More Fun and Frolics with our pals at Google

I’m never through ranting about website being ready for Mobile, and Google has just released a new tool to measure how ready your site is for mobile.

https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/

Now, of course I’ve been punching in lots of sites to see how they rate, starting with this one, and it doesn’t look good. However, when you start to see comparisons, and you rate favourably compared to Twitter, you know the numbers are low for everyone. The best mobile speed I’ve found, is Google itself, which gets a “fair” ranking, but everyone from Microsoft, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, gets “poor” for their mobile speed. Which I guess just tells us that we’ve got a lot to do before Google is willing to rank even itself as “Good” for mobile speed.

The more interesting parts of the tool, come in the pages after the initial scores, where Google gives you a list of improvements you could make to improve your score. Running a WordPress site, you’re lucky that taking their list of faults and searching for Plugin’s which help with each problem, means you can get around many of these with only a little work, we’ve managed to get our score up a few points by installing compression on our pages, and I’m sure there are others which will help even further.

Anyway, as well as being a useful little tool Google has made available to us all, it’s an interesting peek into how other big name websites are dealing with the move to a mainly mobile web, as well as a peek into exactly where Google itself thinks the web must go to remain useful.