Over the last several months, NK Labs has been revitalizing our website. Long-time followers of our company may remember our original site was an extremely minimalistic, one-page destination with a few keywords and our contact information. Since then, we have added a substantial amount of content to highlight our wide range of capabilities and describe some of our unique past projects.
However, in the process, we found that our site was not considered mobile-friendly by Google, which was negatively impacting our Google Ranking. More specifically, the issue was that the site took too long to load on a mobile 3G connection. Thus, I set out to improve our mobile speed, but, as a website development beginner, I needed to do some research to find out what resources were available. After sifting through a lot of documentation, I ended up finding some particularly useful tools which I wanted to compile here so that others might not have to dig through as much content across various sites in the future.
1. Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools
This tool, and Chrome DevTools in general, has a lot of functionality to help quickly evaluate your site. Simply go to any of your web pages, launch DevTools by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + I and select the "Audits" panel. After pressing "Perform An Audit," you can select which tests you need (in this case, I was most concerned with the Performance test, but the others are also useful) and run the audit.
2. Moz
Moz gauges the legitimacy of a site and its inbound and outbound links, all of which affect the site's Google Ranking. This is great because it informs you of the credibility of your own site and also that of all the sites which have links to your site.
This tool can test the speed and optimization of a site both on mobile and desktop. In addition, it suggests SEO tips to help you to further improve your site.
There are a ton of other articles and forums that together can provide a much more detailed understanding of the nuances of optimizing for mobile, but I found that the tools above were the most helpful in my experience. I hope these tools can help save you some time while designing your own websites.
NK Labs, LLC is a product development engineering firm in Cambridge, MA. We have broad experience in the design of consumer electronics, robotics, and other innovative products. Please consider us for your next engineering design project!