How to Ensure Mobile-Friendliness: Testing Across Devices

In today’s competitive digital world, ensuring that your website or app is mobile-friendly is no longer optional but a necessity. With more people accessing content from their smartphones and tablets than ever before, a seamless mobile experience is crucial to keeping users engaged and satisfied. But how can you ensure your site or app works well across all devices? The answer lies in conducting a mobile friendly test across multiple devices.  

Testing mobile-friendliness involves much more than checking how a website looks on a phone. It requires thorough testing across different screen sizes, resolutions, operating systems, and browsers to ensure your users have a smooth experience, no matter how they access your content.

In this blog, we’ll explore why mobile-friendly testing is so important, how to conduct comprehensive tests across devices, and the best tools and practices to ensure your site or app meets today’s mobile expectations.  

Let’s get started!

What is Mobile Friendly Test?

A Mobile-Friendly Test is an important tool that enables website owners and developers to confirm their websites are optimized for mobile devices. With an increasing focus on mobile users in today’s digital world, websites must provide an accessible and intuitive experience on smartphones and tablets. This testing tool identifies areas needing improvement, ensuring users have a seamless, engaging experience across mobile platforms.

LT Browser is a free, effective mobile testing tool designed to evaluate a website’s performance, specifically on mobile device viewports. It thoroughly examines key elements such as load times, layout, usability, and content presentation on various screen sizes. The main objective is to deliver a smooth, efficient user experience for visitors accessing the website from mobile devices.

Similar to Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, LT Browser assigns a score indicating how well a website performs on mobile devices. Higher scores reflect better mobile optimization, which can positively influence a website’s ranking in search engine results. Given the growing number of mobile internet users, ensuring mobile-friendliness is crucial for websites to maintain user engagement and comply with search engine expectations.

Why is Mobile Friendly Test Important?

In recent years, Google has penalized many websites that offer a poor mobile experience. It has been confirmed that the mobile-friendly test is a crucial factor in Google’s overall ranking criteria. With mobile users growing exponentially, ensuring your website is mobile-responsive and offers a high-quality user experience is more important than ever.

A mobile-friendly website is crucial for ensuring easy access and usability on mobile devices. With the growing popularity of smartphones and tablets, many people are browsing the internet on these devices.

Mobile-first design is essential because of the widespread reliance on mobile devices. It guarantees better user experiences, improves search engine rankings, and prepares websites for the future.

Boosted Discoverability on SERPs: Google’s algorithm prioritizes mobile-friendly sites, boosting discoverability on search engines (SERPs), crucial for business success.

Growing Mobile Usage: The number of mobile users has surpassed desktop users globally. People are more likely to access the internet on a mobile device, making it crucial for websites to cater to this audience.

Enhancing Online Presence Effectively: Mobile-first design helps businesses reach more clients and enhance their online presence effectively.

Shifting Advertising Focus to Mobile: Businesses now invest more in mobile advertising than TV commercials, emphasizing the need for mobile-friendly websites.

Performance Optimization: Designing for mobile first often leads to better performance. Mobile devices generally have less processing power and slower internet connections than desktops, so mobile-friendly testing and approach encourage developers to optimize for speed and efficiency.

How to Test Mobile-Friendliness Across Devices?

Understandably, mobile testing is a complex task with many challenges, However, the right approach, strategy, and tool can resolve all major bugs and challenges and decrease efforts. Here is a list of different methods for mobile testing with detailed steps and practical examples.

1. Testing on Chrome DevTool

Google Chrome DevTool offers some most powerful tools for web development and debugging. You can use Chrome DevTool to test your website on multiple mobile devices. You can emulate various mobile devices to test your mobile’s responsiveness and functionality across different sizes and screen resolutions.

Follow the steps below for mobile website testing using Chrome DevTool for a seamless user experience:

i) Open Google Chrome on your desktop and open the website for mobile website testing.

ii) Press F12 to open the Chrome DevTool; another way to open Chrome DevTool is to right-click on the mouse and select “Inspect.”

iii) Select the Device toggle bar. The shortcut for it is Ctrl + Shift + M.

iv) You will receive a panel on Chrome DevTool where you will get options such as:

• Dimensions
• Inbox for putting dimensions manually
• Zooming options
• Network throttling
• Rotate option

v) Click on the first option, “Dimensions,” to get the dropdown menu for different emulated devices. You will get the entire list of devices if you click the “Edit” option.

vi) From there, you can select the mobile website testing devices and analyze your website behavior on different devices.

LT Browser 2.0 For Responsive Testing

Mobile website testing with Chrome DevTool can be leveraged with LT Browser 2.0. LT Browser 2.0 is a dev-friendly Chromium-based browser offered by LambdaTest, a unified AI native testing cloud platform that enables developers and testers to test their websites or web applications over more than 5000+ different browsers, OS and device resolutions.

LT Browser 2.0 provides 50+ pre-installed device viewports for mobile, tablet, desktop, and laptop to perform responsive testing on your website or web applications.

Using this browser, developers can also get additional features like side-by-side view, scroll sync, instant debugging, network throttling, hot reloading, etc., and generate your websites’ performance reports powered by Google Lighthouse.

LT Browser 2.0 has the following features:

• Replay or retest user flows with the help of the Chrome recorder panel.
• Select any HTML element on a web page and access its CSS properties using the CSS Inspector.
• You can get the color of any pixel on the screen with a click of a button using the Color Picker feature.
• You can tweak the network speed and validate the website behavior on different network conditions.
• Run a performance report for your mobile website that helps you identify issues affecting your website’s overall performance and rankings.
• One-click bug logging, integration with your favorite project management tools, and collaboration with your team to fix bugs faster.
• Native developer tools to quickly fix the issue and validate your changes on the go.
• Enable touch mode, generate full-page screenshots, record videos, and capture screenshots.

2. Testing on Emulators & Simulators

Other than Chrome DevTools, you can use an Android emulator and iOS simulator. These help you identify UI and UX bugs and provide an end-user experience. Although they aren’t the best options to perform mobile website testing as emulators are built to test native apps, having other options like mobile emulators for browser testing is still helpful.

You can perform mobile website testing with the help of an Android emulator and an iOS Simulator on LambdaTest. Here are steps you can follow:

i) Sign up for free or log in to the LambdaTest account.

ii) In the Dashboard, you will get an option for Real-Time Testing.

iii) Now select Browser testing, where you will get the entire list of Mobile Brands, Devices OS, and Browsers.

iv) Enter the URL of the website, and select your specifications like browser, OS, and device type. And press “START.”

It will launch a cloud-based emulator/simulator where you can test mobile websites. Emulators and simulators have many advantages, such as easy access, zero inventory and maintenance, and lower cost.

However, they have many limitations regarding accuracy and reliability, and they may not be able to handle a complex real-world scenario; for that, mobile website testing on a real device is essential.

3. Testing on Real Device Cloud

Testing your website on real devices gives you a clear picture of how the website looks and acts. For developers, browser tools might be appealing to test on the go rather than testing on real devices. However, real devices might help you explore avenues for testing that a browser tool cannot. For example, you don’t get the screen’s realistic view because of distractions like the URL bar and other toolbars.

Mobile testing on a real device uses an online real device cloud such as LambdaTest, where you will get a wide range of real devices for mobile website testing. Here are the steps you need to follow for testing on real devices:

i) Open LambdaTest Dashboard, where you will get an option for Real Device.

ii) When you click on Real Device, you will get an option for “Browser Testing.”

iii) Click on “Browser Testing.” Place the URL of the website on which you want to perform mobile website testing and select the Brand, Device, OS, and Browser.

iv) Click the “START” button to test the mobile website on real devices.

Some unique and practical features of LambdaTest Real Device Cloud are

• LambdaTest has a huge list of real mobile devices. It will eliminate the requirement for an in-house device library.

• Run large numbers of tests with your preferred automation testing frameworks, such as Appium, XCUITest, Espresso, and others.

• Connect the testing to your CI/CD pipeline or share the bug in the team chat app with a single click to eliminate slow feedback loops and accelerate delivery.

• Before going live, perform geolocation testing to ensure your application is compatible with regional preferences. Before releasing your website and apps to the target market, test them on actual devices to ensure they operate as planned.

Conclusion

Mobile devices have now become an integral part of our lives. For businesses, having a mobile-friendly, functional website with a smooth user experience is extremely important. In this blog, You learned some crucial elements of mobile website testing, why it matters, and an ideal approach to help you attain quality output.

Whether you are a tester or a developer, having the right knowledge about mobile website testing, tools, and methods saves time and effort, emphasizes the user experience through the right approach, and gives the best results. In the digital era, web technology is continuously evolving; making mobile website testing an integral part of website development can help ensure that your website experience meets the user’s needs.

Selenium supports mobile web testing by automating interactions on browsers within real devices and emulators. Selenium mobile testing enables cross-browser testing, parallel execution, and integration with cloud platforms. For mobile apps (native/hybrid), Appium extends Selenium WebDriver capabilities.