Mobile Friendly Test (HTML signals)

Google retired its public Mobile-Friendly Test in December 2023. Google also retired the Search Console Mobile Usability report that month. If you bookmarked the old test URL hoping for a quick green checkmark, it is gone. PageSpeed Insights, the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console, and a few minutes on a real phone now do the job. This guide is the order we use on a single important URL: HTML signals first, then performance metrics. The matching tool is the Mobile Friendly Test on Scrawl: it reads the HTML response and inline CSS only. It is not a Google verdict. What Google actually turned off In October 2023 , Google said the Mobile-Friendly Test and its API would be retired in December 2023. The test was a public page that rendered your URL and reported simple pass/fail style issues such as viewport problems or content wider than the screen. What did not go away: Mobile-first indexing. For most sites, Google crawls and indexes the mobile version of pages. PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse. Lab audits plus CrUX field data when Google has enough Chrome history for the URL. Core Web Vitals in Search Console. Field LCP, INP, and CLS buckets for URLs with data (this replaced the old mobile usability report for performance troubleshooting). What you lose is the one-click public badge and the dedicated mobile usability issue list. Third-party HTML checkers can fill part of the HTML gap, but none of them speak for Google. Step 1: Viewport, zoom, and document basics (HTML) Start with what is in the first HTML response, because that is what many crawlers see before JavaScript runs. Open the Mobile Friendly Test and paste the full URL (include https:// ). The tool fetches the page and reports: Viewport meta: Is width=device-width present? Fixed pixel…