[Resolved] Being told that its NOT responsive?!

[Michael]

Hello! I know that there are some scammers out today trying to tell all of us our sites are not responsive for mobile, but I did check mine on Googles developer tool, and it says that mine is not? I thought the template that I purchased would be, or am I missed something?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Michael

[Tom]

Hi Michael,

GP is definitely responsive – here’s the Google mobile friendly test for this site: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgeneratepress.com

Do you perhaps have any plugins interfering with the mobile responsiveness of the site? How’s it look when you go to it on your phone?

[Andrey]

Hi, Tom!

I installed GP on my other site – samaralife.com – and Google-check-mobile-readiness site says it is not mobile-friendly for two reasons – content width is bigger than the screen and links are too close to each other (since judging by the screenshot menu list isn’t fast enough to transform from the list to the menu as seen on desktops).

Tried with Jetpack mobile theme switched off and on – same results. No other mobile-related plugins installed. Tried deactivating “Move JS to footer” code snippet – same result.

[Tom]

I just tested your site using Google’s tool and it said this:

This page may appear not mobile-friendly because the robots.txt file may block Googlebot from loading some of the page’s resources.

I took a look at your robots.txt file, and it’s indeed blocking Google from loading any of the theme’s stylesheets or files.

Once Google is allowed to crawl /wp-content/themes and /wp-content/plugins, your website should pass the check 🙂

[Andrey]

Thank you! Changed my robots.txt file to be exactly like that of aviascope in terms of allowing/disallowing. Not working. Still same two reasons – content is wider than the screen and links are too close to each other (though I deactivated “Move JS to footer” snippet). Will probably try another theme, though this whole Google thing sucks (I mean Google sucks in the way it stops creation and makes one think only of coding and stuff).

[Andrey]

Had to open access to plugins in robot file to finally pass the sodding Google test. But this is insane from Google to make users open administrative files for crawling – looks like Google (or who’s behind it) wants to know everything.

[Andrey]

Final thought. It is rather strange that aviascope.com passed the test with plugins disallowed in robots.txt and JS moved to footer (but another theme), while samaralife.com couldn’t.

[Tom]

It all depends on how the site is mobile.

For example, GeneratePress uses CSS media queries to become mobile, so the themes directory needs to be accessed by Google to read those files and make the site mobile. This isn’t out of the ordinary – if you don’t let Googlebots see your style.css file, they’ll assume the site has no styling – which isn’t good for our rankings, no matter what theme you use.

If your site uses a plugin to be mobile, Google needs to see the plugins folder etc..

[Author]

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