Testing Your Mobile Website Performance

Carolina Usbeck - December 23, 2009

Have you ever wondered how to test a website designed for mobile phones? There are a couple of sites that can be of great help to test for websites designed for mobile phones. When creating a site to be viewed in a small screen, it is important to make a simple design, it will be easier to fix when testing, for good performance.

When creating a mobile website for the first time it is good to look at other websites that have been designed for mobile phones, this provides you with ideas of how to create a site. A way to view mobile websites in a computer is by using a Firefox plug-in called User Agent Switcher, this plug-in allows you to add user agents of mobile phones you would like to test your website on or view someone else’s website. After you have your design in mind and you have implemented it, you can begin testing the site. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides a mobileOK Checker that checks if a mobile website is mobile friendly. The site url that is placed on this site to be checked will return a result ranging from 0 to 100, 100 being the most mobile friendly site. Another site you can use to check for performance is mobiReady.com; this site uses the W3C mobileOk and also provides device emulators to check how a site looks.  

After fixing the errors on your site, you can continue to check the site look and feel in more devices. There is an application called Keynote, which provides a wide range of user agents and an emulator to view your site. The application also shows the code being used, the access time for each individual page, any syntax warnings, among a lot of other useful information.

It is important to keep in mind a website that loads faster will be more user-friendly and when it comes to mobile websites this factor is very important. When it comes to SEO, it is important to make sure your site has GA coding to help its ranking position as well as adding content that contains special keywords.