This post first appeared on Morgan Linton’s blog.

Google is making a major change on June 1st, one that they started to talk about back in 2016 and are finally bringing live next month. The idea makes a lot of sense but it could also leave some website owners in a tricky situation if they haven’t already taken a mobile-first approach themselves.

Here’s the skinny:

That means that when a new website is registered it will be crawled by Google’s smartphone Googlebot, and its mobile-friendly content will be used to index its pages, as well as to understand the site’s structured data and to show snippets from the site in Google’s search results, when relevant.

(Source – Techcrunch)

As many of you know, when you visit my blog on a mobile phone, it looks completely different. I have a nice handy plugin for WordPress that does this for me. The ads go away, all distractions disappear, and instead the focus is on what is should be on mobile – content.

Still, there are a ton of website and blogs out there that don’t have a great mobile experience and they are likely going to start to notice less traffic coming from search starting in June. Not only is Google using the mobile version of a site to get content for indexing, for years now it has been ranking sites higher that are mobile friendly:

As we noted earlier this year, today’s the day we begin globally rolling out our mobile-friendly update. We’re boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. Now searchers can more easily find high-quality and relevant results where text is readable without tapping or zooming, tap targets are spaced appropriately, and the page avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling.

(Source – Google Webmaster Central Blog)

The good news is, it has never been easier to make your site mobile-friendly, especially if you use a platform like WordPress. Here’s a handy article that compares seven different WordPress plugins to make your blog look great on mobile.

Don’t use WordPress? Don’t worry. Here’s a solid article to help you understand how to make your site mobile friendly, and if you’re not a developer, don’t worry there either, there are more web developers than ever now and places like Upwork can help you connect with one for a fraction of what you would have paid only a few years ago.

It’s important to remember that while you might still be someone that surfs the web (do people still say that?) on your Desktop with your huge monitor, most people around the world are looking at your site on a tiny Smartphone screen…and that trend is here to stay.

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