The mobile crawl: take your mobile website to the next level

Mobile usage trends clearly demonstrate that mobile optimization is more important than ever. Mobile internet use has grown 504% since 2011, as users increasingly turn to their mobile devices to purchase products and services. In 2018, Google started implementing its policy of mobile-first crawling to cater to their now primarily mobile users. Now, Google crawls the mobile version of a website to judge the overall standard of a website. Therefore, the better your mobile website, the better your chances of ranking highly, leading to more visitors and conversions.

To stay competitive, you must ensure your website provides a good user experience on mobile devices. With the latest feature, the Mobile Crawl, Ryte can help you ensure your website is mobile-friendly so that your users can achieve their goals when accessing your site on a mobile device.

How does the mobile crawl work?

When creating a new project, you can choose whether you want to analyze your desktop or mobile site.

Figure 1: Choose the mobile user agent when starting a new project

When you choose to analyze your mobile website, the user agent uses a simulated mobile viewport to crawl your site. This is based on the device Google uses in Lighthouse (Google’s open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages.) You will then be able to see issues specific to your mobile website, such as 404 error pages and mobile page speed.

The mobile user agent can analyze all mobile websites, no matter what mobile strategy you use (i.e. AMP, responsive design, PWA). When you analyze your mobile site for the first time, we recommend you start a new project specifically for your mobile site. This will make it easier to track your progress over time.

Analyzing the page speed of your mobile site

One of the most vital aspects of website optimization is page speed, as this has such a significant impact on user experience, rankings, and conversion rate. According to Google research, 53% of mobile site visitors leave if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

When you’ve carried out a mobile crawl, one of the first things you should check is the performance.

We have just released the new page speed report, which is based on user-centered metrics used by Google in PageSpeed Insights. It provides a score showing whether your pages are fast, slow, or very slow. You can find out more about the new page speed report in this article.

The page speed report differs between mobile and desktop in one vital way: when you crawl your mobile website, the mobile user agent will use the default network and CPU throttling settings as in PageSpeed Insights.

Throttling involves deliberately slowing down the bandwidth so that the crawler simulates users with a slower internet connection. Internet connections are generally slower on mobile devices, so using throttling means you will end up with a more realistic indication of the speed of your mobile website.

Click on any URL to be directed to Google PageSpeed Insights, where you will find even more metrics and tips for how to improve your mobile page speed.

Figure 2: Test your mobile website in PageSpeed Insights

Who can use the mobile crawl?

Mobile crawls are carried out by the High-Performance Crawler, which you can activate in the project settings by clicking on "Enable JavaScript Crawling." All users who have enabled JavaScript Crawling can start a mobile crawl. If you’re a Ryte Business Suite Customer who does not use the JavaScript crawler, you can still start a mobile crawl - it will be automatically carried out by the High-Performance Crawler.

Conclusion

Analyzing your mobile website exclusively will make it easy for you to see vital errors and performance issues on your mobile website.

Today, no matter the business or industry, no website can afford to be lagging behind in mobile optimization. Start a mobile crawl now and make sure your website is fully optimized for mobile devices.