In this four-part blog series on basic website management, we’ve already covered how page load speeds and dead links can impact home improvement marketing performance. We’ve also provided some tips on how to test for and fix these problems. Today, we’re looking at an equally important site function: mobile friendliness.

Mobile-Friendly Is No Longer an Option
We’ve said it a number of times in the past few years, but it’s important enough to be repeated again: A mobile-friendly website is an absolute must for any business that markets or sells online.

Here are just a few reasons you can’t ignore mobile:

• Google cares about it. Google uses mobile friendliness as a ranking symbol, so a site that doesn’t perform on mobile devices is less likely to perform in SERPs. Google’s mobile-first indexing policy could even mean sites that aren’t mobile-friendly won’t show up in search at all.
• Mobile adoption is growing. More people access the internet on mobile than on desktop or laptop computers. If your site doesn’t work on smaller screens, you’re potentially losing access to 50 percent or more of your target audience.

Is Your Home Improvement Website Mobile-Friendly?
You can check to see if your home improvement marketing website is mobile-friendly using a couple of tactics.

First, you can navigate to your site on your own device. Click around and view different pages. Try to send a quote request or click a CTA button to ensure functionality works. If you have employees, friends, or family members with different devices, ask if they can do the same to ensure your site works on various screen sizes and platforms.

You can also use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Simply enter your URL and click “Test URL.” Google returns information about whether your page is mobile-friendly and provides a rendering of what it might look like on a mobile device screen.

If your site fails the mobile-friendly test, you must make some changes. One of the easiest ways to ensure your site works on mobile devices is to invest in responsive design. If you used a content management system such as WordPress, a fix might be as simple as switching your template. In other cases, you may need to reach out to your web developer for assistance.