Google on Mobile Optimised Websites

It doesn’t matter if you love or hate Google, when they have an opinion you’d be foolish not to pay attention. This week Google have published their views on how web developers should approach building smartphone-optimised websites, and by extension the mobile web.

They summarise their position like this:

Google supports smartphone-optimized sites in three configurations:

1. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google’s recommended configuration.
2. Sites that dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user-agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
3. Sites that have separate mobile and desktop URLs.

Of course Google wouldn’t close off every other alternative but what they are doing is clearly stating a preference for responsive web design in the creation of websites for mobile devices.

We’ve written here a couple of times about responsive web design, indeed this website adopts the approach and it’s also a service we offer new customers. Google communicating their position is great to see as it helps justify the time we’ve invested in adopting this technique. We always believed in the power of responsive web design but if Google were to have an alternative view then selling such an approach to search conscious clients would have been impossible.

The web is increasingly being consumed on a wide range of devices and environments. Responsive design is the best method we have currently to optimise a single website for a range of differing situations. To have a website that simply works on your desktop computer is no longer enough, it has to work wherever an internet connection can reach.