Want to Check Mobile View of Website? When a web application is developed, it is tested across various platforms for responsiveness and functionality to ensure that it offers a friendly user experience. Earlier, web app testing was only limited to a few desktop versions and operating systems. But, after the innovation in mobile technology, developers have shifted their focus towards mobile devices and browsers as well.
According to Statista, it is reported that more than 57% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, which makes it crucial for developers to ensure that their web app is well-optimized for mobile browsers.
But why is it necessary to make your web app mobile-friendly? Does it help in getting more traffic or improve your business? Let’s look at the following reasons that describe why it is necessary to have a mobile-friendly website.
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Reasons to Have a Mobile-Friendly Website
You might have developed a perfect web app, but that doesn’t mean it is optimized for all mobile phones and tablets. The reasons given below explain why you need to have a mobile-friendly website.
1. Google recognizes mobile-friendly websites earlier
Google keeps updating its search algorithm from time to time to provide visitors with the most accurate results for their search. As 57% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites over those that are not mobile-responsive. So, ideally, a mobile-friendly website helps you rank better in search engines.
2. Helps in building credibility
Having a mobile-friendly website gives your visitors a friendly experience on mobile devices, which in turn helps you build credibility with your clients, customers, and influencers, as they consider your website a credible resource of information and services.
3. People use mobile devices everywhere
It is reported that around 3 billion people in the world use smartphones for everything, whether it is scrolling social media platforms or purchasing goods and services. This makes it crucial for businesses to make their web app mobile-friendly so that users get a good experience from it.
4. Help you stay ahead of your competitors
If you haven’t developed a mobile-friendly website, it doesn’t mean your competitors are also following you. They might have already made their web app mobile responsive in order to get maximum traffic on their site. And when customers look for something over the internet from smartphones, they always prefer a mobile-friendly website. Thus, having a mobile-responsive website will help you stay ahead of your competitors.
5. Better browsing experience for mobile users
A web app always needs additional testing and modification to be mobile-friendly, as the desktop version of a website is not compatible with mobile devices due to various reasons, such as display size, screen resolution, mobile browser functionality, etc. So, when you develop a responsive design of a web app for mobile devices, it functions well across those devices and provides a better browsing experience to visitors.
6. Improve your visibility
With a mobile-friendly website, you can reach a wider audience, as people always share a website that offers a good user experience. Besides, it has also become a ranking factor on Google, which means having a mobile-friendly website will help you appear higher in search results.
How to Check Mobile View of Website
There are plenty of tools and methods that can be used to check the mobile view of a website. Even Google itself provides developer tools that can be utilized to view the mobile version of a website. Here, we have covered 5 best ways to check the mobile view of a website.
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Video Tutorial
We provided this article in the form of a Video Tutorial for our reader’s convenience. If you are interested in reading, skip the video for now and watch it after the completion of reading this article.
1. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Google offers various responsive design checker tools to check the mobile version of a web app, and Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is one of them. In this test, the Googlebot checks your web app and ensures whether your website is mobile-friendly or not. To check the mobile view of your app with Mobile-Friendly Test, follow the below steps:
- Visit Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
- Enter the URL for your web app in the given field and click Test URL
- The tool will start analyzing your website for the mobile view
- If your site passes the test, then a message will appear on the screen displaying: ‘Awesome! Your Website is Mobile-Friendly,’ and if it doesn’t pass the test, then you will see a message: ‘Not mobile-friendly.’
If the website fails to pass the test, then the tool will provide you with specific reasons behind its failure. You can use that feedback to improve your site and make it mobile-friendly.
Analyzing your web app with this tool not only helps in checking the mobile version of your site, but it also helps you learn that your web app could be pushed down in search results by Google if it doesn’t score good results with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
2. By Utilizing Viewports of your Site
Viewports is a web design concept that can be utilized to check the mobile view of a website. You can also get help from various tools like Google Resizer, Google DevTools Device Mode, and SEOptimer to see how the viewports are formatted on your website. However, if there are offset viewports on your web app, then it can lead to significant consequences, such as penalizing the SEO, causing errors in reading content on the page, etc.
Many websites that are 10 to 15 years old are often not able to use their viewports effectively and require extra code restructuring to work proficiently. So, if you’re facing issues with viewports, then it is an early sign for major problems in the future. Also, if you find major issues with viewports, it means the website was never built with mobile responsive design in mind.
3. Google PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is another excellent responsive design checker tool in Google DevTools that can be used to check the responsiveness of your web app elements across mobile devices. PageSpeed Insights has been used by developers for a while now to check the responsiveness of their websites.
The best part about using this tool is that it doesn’t only check the responsiveness of your site for mobile devices, but also provides you with detailed information on where you need to make improvements to make your website more mobile-friendly. It provides you with various screenshots, comparing the mobile and desktop view of your web app, as well as speed scores on both mobile and desktop devices.
We believe this is the best free tool that can be used to check the speed and responsiveness of web apps across both mobile and desktop devices.
4. Chrome DevTools Device Simulation
Google Chrome is the most popular web browser that is widely used on both mobile and desktop devices. In fact, 51.65% of web traffic that comes from mobile devices is generated via the Chrome browser. That’s why it also provides the device simulation feature in Chrome DevTools to help developers view the mobile version of their site.
To use this feature in Google Chrome, follow the below steps:
- Open your website URL in the Google Chrome browser
- When your web app is loaded completely, open DevTools by clicking F12 on the keyboard
- The Inspect Element section will appear on the screen. Here, click the Device Toggle Toolbar
- Now, select a device that you want to simulate from the list of Android and iOS Devices
- On selecting the specific device, the mobile view of your web app will display in the Chrome browser
Similarly, you can select other devices and check the mobile version of your site on those devices.
The above methods might help you check the mobile view of your website, but it is not an ideal approach to test the web app for mobile devices and browsers. Also, there are plenty of mobile phones and browsers available in the market, and each of them has its own rendering engine, which can display your web app content differently. Thus, to gain accurate results and insights, developers need to perform extensive testing across various mobile browsers and devices.
But, checking each mobile device and browser manually could be very time-consuming, that’s why developers need an automated solution to test their web app across specific smartphones and browsers.
LT Browser for Mobile App Testing
LT Browser is an automated tool developed by LambdaTest to help developers test their web apps across more than 25+ devices. It allows developers to interact with the mobile view of their web app across various screen sizes of smartphones and tablets. It is integrated with multiple features and functionalities that make it an ideal choice for web app testing on mobile devices.
- A friendly browser that allows you to check the mobile view of a website across Android and iOS devices
- Check the responsiveness of web apps across various screen sizes and resolutions
- Allow you to create your own custom devices to perform screen resolution tests on various screens
- Integrated with DevTools that allow you to debug multiple devices while executing responsive testing
- Ideal for testing locally hosted websites without any extension or tunnel
- Comes with a built-in image editor that highlights a responsive bug quickly
- Allow you to share responsive bugs with your team members in a single click
- Comes with Video recording and screen capturing feature to record the entire test session of your mobile app
The major benefit of LT Browser is that it is specifically designed to check the responsiveness of a web app across various mobile devices that are widely used by the audience.
LambdaTest for Responsive Testing of Web App
Apart from checking the mobile view, if you want to perform responsive testing of your website across various browsers, browser versions, operating systems, and devices, then LambdaTest can help you in your quest. It is a cloud-based automated Selenium grid that allows you to test your web app across a combination of more than 2000 browsers, operating systems, and devices to check the responsiveness of your web app. It provides you with competitive advantages over other cloud-based testing tools:
- Perform online resolution testing to check the mobile version of your web app across various screen sizes.
- Verify how your website performs across multiple Android devices in both portrait and landscape mode.
- Quick responsive testing of web apps across 16+ Android screen sizes like Google Pixel, OnePlus, Samsung Galaxy S10+, etc.
- Execute responsive testing of your web app on major iOS devices and browsers like Safari, Opera, UC Browser, and more.
- Test your locally hosted web pages in the most popular web browser with the Lambda Tunnel feature.
Performing responsive testing with LambdaTest is pretty straightforward; even first-time users can test their web app for responsiveness across desired platforms.
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Wrap Up
Checking a web app for mobile responsiveness is crucial for developers to analyze how it looks and performs across various mobile devices. However, it is not possible manually, as you cannot check each mobile device and browser one by one. So, in this article, we covered various tools that can be used to see the mobile version of a website, as well as we talked about two automated testing tools that are helpful in mobile app testing of a web app.
I hope this tutorial helped you to set up the “Top 4 Ways to Check Mobile View of Website” feature. If you like this article, please share it with your friends. If you want more blogging tips, follow BlogVwant on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Top 4 Ways to Check Mobile View of Website – FAQs
How does my site look on different devices?
Website Responsiveness Checker is a simple yet powerful tool that allows you to test how your website looks and behaves on different devices and screen sizes.
What is mobile-friendly SEO?
Mobile friendly means that a website works the same and provides a seamless user experience (UX) regardless of the device it’s accessed on.
What is a mobile sitemap in SEO?
A mobile sitemap is a version of a website’s sitemap that is optimized for mobile devices. It helps search engines understand the structure of a website and how it is organized for mobile users.
What makes a website mobile responsive?
A mobile responsive website is a website that is capable of adapting its content based on the device it is being viewed on. The layout and design of a website are generally created for desktop users.
What is mobile optimization?
Mobile Optimization is the process of adjusting your website content to ensure that visitors who access the site from mobile devices have an experience customized to their device.