Does Google Think Your Membership Website is Mobile-Friendly?

by Kimberly Coleman | Troubleshooting

pmpro_google-mobile-friendlyHave you been stressing out over Google’s announcement about mobile-friendly sites and search ranking impact?

Here’s a quick step you can take to (potentially) calm your nerves and get the information you need to meet the search giant’s requirement of mobile-friendliness:

Try Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

Using Paid Memberships Pro on your site will not make an otherwise mobile-friendly site fail this test. We have tested our plugin with the included WordPress themes and the sites all pass 100%.

What pages to test

Try running a few URLs through the test – your homepage, blog page, contact page, etc. Test pages that you are already receiving high search traffic for, because these are the pages you do not want to see negatively impacted by the mobile-friendly ranking signal.

Simplify mobile testing with Webmaster Tools

If you are using Google’s Webmaster Tools (or you aren’t but you should be), log in to your account to get a full list of mobile usability issues across your site using the Mobile Usability Report.

Read this official statement from Google:

If your site’s pages aren’t mobile-friendly, there may be a significant decrease in mobile traffic from Google Search. But have no fear, once your site becomes mobile-friendly, we will automatically re-process (i.e., crawl and index) your pages.  You can also expedite the process by using Fetch as Google with Submit to Index, and then your pages can be treated as mobile-friendly in ranking.

— Rolling out the mobile-friendly update – April 21, 2015

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Google Webmaster Tools: Mobile Usability Report

What we’re working on: Revamping the Plugin-generated Pages

by Kimberly Coleman | About PMPro

Just wanted to shoot out an update on some new development we are working on for Paid Memberships Pro. If you have feedback or ideas, please post in the comments.

Table-free Membership Checkout and Billing Information Page

The default Membership Checkout and Billing Information pages (displayed when using the [pmpro_checkout] and [pmpro_billing] shortcode) currently use a table layout (this was standard for WP forms years ago). We’re recoding these templates to use a div layout. This will make the checkout page more accessible and more responsive and “device-friendly”.

We’ll provide an add on that “falls back” to the old templates should you wish to continue using the previous design.

Table-optional Membership Levels Page

The default Membership Levels page (displayed when using the [pmpro_levels] shortcode) currently displays in a table layout. We’re planning to offer both table and div style layout as an attribute of the shortcode. For more options to customize the levels display, see the Advanced Levels Page Shortcode Add On.