Mobile Friendliness: The Most Important Factor for Google Discover?

Many factors must be considered to make your website eligible for Google Discover. Making your website mobile-friendly (responsive) is perhaps the most important one.

Google Discover is an exclusive product built for mobile users, though Google is testing out Discover for Desktop devices.

That being said, your website must be mobile-friendly, or it may get kicked out of Google Discover, as my mom’s recipe website did for a brief period.

How do I check if my website is mobile-friendly?

Google’s mobile-friendly test tool will be retired on December 1, 2023. To test a page’s mobile usability, use Chrome Lighthouse.

Alternatively, you can check it on the Search Console dashboard. If your pages are not mobile-friendly, you will get notified here.

To make your website mobile-friendly, you have two options

1. Use Google AMP: Google’s accelerated mobile pages (AMP) is a framework made by Google that makes your website 100% mobile-friendly and fast as lightning (they used a lightning icon on AMP pages for a while). AMP is still quite important for Google Discover for these two factors alone, while most websites have started ditching it for good! Google themselves have stated that AMP is not a ranking factor anymore. Besides, there are plenty of reasons not to use AMP anymore in 2023 and beyond.
2. Use a responsive WordPress theme: Use some well-known WordPress themes that are responsive.

Google AMP is good, but there are problems that you have to encounter

• There are lots of validation errors. Not all themes are AMP compatible. It’s the same issue with many plugins, too.
• Need developers for many customizations. Big news publishers can afford them. You and I don’t.
• You can’t use Push notifications with Google AMP.
• You can’t use pop-ups to collect email subscribers.
• Reduced earnings from Adsense ads.
• There are lots of problems if you use structured data and AMP together.

It is 2024 already; move on from Google AMP and use a responsive WordPress theme.

Responsive mobile-friendly WordPress themes

There are many themes in the WordPress theme repository, but choosing one for your website is one of the most important decisions you must make in your blogging career.

I exclusively use the Generatepress theme on ALL of my websites to make them perfectly mobile-friendly for Google Discover and SEO.

I, on many occasions, have been unnecessarily adventurous (no regrets, learned from it) and tried out other themes as well, such as Astra, Neve, OceanWP, ColorMag, Newsmatic, etc., but have inevitably come back to Generetapress. Now, I have become a Generatepress Premium (GP Premium) for life!

You can buy GP Premium for around $50. Great theme, great support.

But I have a GP premium deal for you!

Your website must be blazing fast for blogging and getting tons of traffic from Discover. For this, you must use very good hosting, and yes, Bluehost, Hostgator, Hostinger, GoDaddy, Dreamhost, and even Siteground these days won’t cut it.

I use Fastcomet hosting, with their Fastcloud extra plan.

If you think my website is fast enough, consider buying Fastcomet from my affiliate link below. I will earn a small commission from it at no extra cost to you.

I will give you GP Premium and WP Rocket for Free in return!

Just send me the invoice generated after purchasing Fastcomet hosting, and I will send you GP Premium and WP Rocket over email for FREE!

The subject should be ‘Fastcomet invoice’, and send the invoice to [email protected]

Do you have any other tricks to make your website mobile-friendly? Let me know on X (Twitter)