Resources for developing mobile-friendly pages

Users now browse the mobile version of a site as often (or more often) with a mobile device, rather than browsing with a desktop computer. You should design your website to be viewed by mobile devices.

Mobile devices generally fall into two classes: smartphones and feature phones. Smartphones are essentially mini desktop computers with small screens, and include Android and iPhone devices (we include tablet devices in this classification for design purposes). Feature phones are less capable devices, and are handled differently by Google than smartphones.

For both types of devices:

• The Google search results page is designed for the type of phone making the request (feature or smart phone).
• You can use App Indexing Search Preview to see what the page looks like on that phone type.
• You can block a user agent specific to the mobile device type (smart or feature) in your robots.txt file.
• PageSpeed insights can analyze a page and provide tips for making the page load faster.
• Learn more about developing mobile-friendly sites.

Resources and information for smartphone site developers

• In selected countries, when Google detects a slow connection, Google automatically transcodes pages that are linked to by search results. You can see what the page would look like using the Low Bandwidth Transcoder testing tool. Learn more.
• The Mobile-Friendly Test describes issues that can affect your page when accessed on a smartphone.
• The Search Console mobile usability report describes issues that can affect your page when accessed on a smartphone.
• The Chrome browser supports several smartphone layouts in the device mode & mobile emulator.

Resources and information for feature phone site developers

• SERP and any pages linked by SERP are transcoded globally on any speed network unless either:
  • The page is already "feature-phone ready",
    or
  • The page has a <link rel="alternate" media="handheld" href="alternate_page.htm" /> tag.
• All images in SERP and any pages linked by SERP are resized unless user specifically opts out.
• PageSpeed insights

Feature phone markup

Feature phone web pages come in several markup dialects, including WML, XHTML Basic, XHTML MP, and cHTML. Your choice will vary according to your target market.

Feature phone markup standards

• cHTML
• WML 1.3

Feature phone validators

• Mobile-friendly XHTML Validator (W3C)
• Mobile-readiness checker (.mobi)

Feature phone emulators

• i-mode emulator (DoCoMo)
• User-Agent Switcher (Firefox plug-in)