Mobile-Friendly Test and Tools

To test and optimize your website’s mobile-friendliness, there are several tools available that can help assess your site’s performance and provide suggestions for improvement. Below are some of the most popular and effective tools for testing mobile-friendliness, load speed, and general usability.

1. Google Mobile-Friendly Test

• Tool: Google Mobile-Friendly Test
• Purpose: Tests whether a website is mobile-friendly and provides specific feedback on areas that need improvement.
• Key Features:
  • Simple test with URL input.
  • Provides a mobile-friendly score and detailed suggestions on issues like text size, clickable elements, and viewport configuration.
  • Direct integration with Google Search Console for mobile-related errors.

2. Google PageSpeed Insights

• Tool: Google PageSpeed Insights
• Purpose: Analyzes the performance of your site on both desktop and mobile, providing suggestions to improve page load speed.
• Key Features:
  • Separate mobile and desktop performance scores.
  • Insights into metrics like First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) which impact mobile user experience.
  • Suggestions for optimizing images, minifying CSS/JavaScript, and server-side improvements.

3. GTmetrix

• Tool: GTmetrix
• Purpose: Provides detailed insights into how your site loads on mobile devices, including performance scores and load time breakdown.
• Key Features:
  • Page load performance scores (Speed and Structure).
  • Detailed analysis of mobile-specific performance factors.
  • Recommendations for improving load times such as reducing image sizes and minifying code.
  • Allows testing from different regions and mobile devices (via premium).

4. BrowserStack

• Tool: BrowserStack
• Purpose: Tests how your site looks and behaves across multiple devices, browsers, and screen resolutions.
• Key Features:
  • Real device testing: View your website on real mobile devices and tablets.
  • Live testing and debugging for various screen sizes, resolutions, and OS versions.
  • Cross-browser testing, ensuring consistency on various browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.

5. Lighthouse (by Google)

• Tool: Lighthouse
• Purpose: A comprehensive auditing tool that provides insights into performance, accessibility, SEO, and mobile-friendliness.
• Key Features:
  • Tests performance metrics, accessibility, SEO, Progressive Web App (PWA) readiness, and more.
  • Provides actionable suggestions to improve mobile usability, like ensuring touch target size and avoiding large interstitials.
  • Can be used in Chrome DevTools, via Command Line, or in the Lighthouse Chrome extension.

6. Hotjar / Crazy Egg

• Tool: Hotjar | Crazy Egg
• Purpose: Heatmaps and session recordings to understand user behavior on mobile devices.
• Key Features:
  • Heatmaps: Visualize where users are clicking, tapping, and scrolling on your site.
  • Session Recordings: Watch real user sessions to see how they interact with your site on mobile.
  • Feedback Polls: Collect direct feedback from mobile users to identify pain points.

7. Google Search Console

• Tool: Google Search Console
• Purpose: Tracks and provides reports on your website’s mobile usability and performance in Google Search.
• Key Features:
  • Provides a Mobile Usability Report that shows specific mobile issues on your site, such as content that is wider than the screen or clickable elements too close together.
  • Helps identify mobile indexing issues (important for SEO).
  • Alerts you about mobile usability errors across your site, such as "viewport not set," "text too small," or "interstitials blocking content."

8. WebPageTest

• Tool: WebPageTest
• Purpose: Allows you to test your website’s performance on different mobile devices and locations, focusing on detailed loading time metrics.
• Key Features:
  • Test page load performance from different mobile devices and networks (e.g., 3G, 4G).
  • Detailed waterfall charts showing how each element of the page loads.
  • First Load vs. Repeat Load tests to measure caching effectiveness.

9. AMP Validator

• Tool: AMP Validator
• Purpose: Checks if your web pages are AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) compliant and validates their structure.
• Key Features:
  • Validates AMP pages to ensure they comply with AMP HTML standards.
  • Gives instant feedback on errors and issues preventing AMP pages from displaying correctly on mobile devices.

10. WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool)

• Tool: WAVE
• Purpose: Ensures your mobile website is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities.
• Key Features:
  • Audits web accessibility including touch target sizes and text legibility for mobile.
  • Helps identify mobile usability issues that could hinder users with disabilities (e.g., screen reader compatibility).
  • Provides a detailed accessibility report and suggestions for improvement.

Summary of Key Tools and Features

Tool	Primary Use	Features
Google Mobile-Friendly Test	Basic mobile usability check	Mobile score, suggestions for improvement
PageSpeed Insights	Speed optimization	Mobile-specific performance score, speed improvements
GTmetrix	Performance and speed testing	Detailed mobile performance analysis
BrowserStack	Cross-device testing	Real-device testing for mobile browsers
Lighthouse	Comprehensive auditing	Performance, SEO, accessibility, mobile usability
Hotjar / Crazy Egg	User behavior analytics	Heatmaps, session recordings
Google Search Console	Mobile indexing and usability	Mobile usability errors, indexing issues
WebPageTest	Performance testing	Detailed mobile load times and performance
AMP Validator	AMP page validation	Checks AMP compliance
WAVE	Web accessibility audit	Mobile accessibility, usability