Google's Mobile Friendly Test

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AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around Google’s Mobile Friendly Test. limeblast ran the test on their Discourse site and received a fail, citing that links are too close together. When comparing this to the Meta Discourse site, which passes the test, limeblast wonders what the difference is between the two installs.

Moter8 mentions that the test doesn’t display their Discourse installation’s site at all. codinghorror suggests that this issue may have been covered in a previous thread, but limeblast clarifies that their issue is related to link spacing, not images.

mbs and Mittineague suggest that custom CSS edits may be the cause, specifically the CSS for links on limeblast’s site. limeblast plans to tidy up their CSS to see if it makes a difference. Fabio_Machado_de_Oli also experiences similar issues with the test, including warnings for category pages and horizontal scroll on some topics.

1

After one of my clients sent me a link to Google’s Mobile Friendly test (in relation to some changes coming on the 21st April) I decided to run the test on my discourse site:

Mobile-Friendly Test - Mozilla Firefox_036.png1855×1056 117 KB

So I initially came here to ask about this, and to find out if there was anything which could be done about it, but before doing so, I figured I’d run the test on this meta site:

Mobile-Friendly Test - Mozilla Firefox_037.png1855×1056 105 KB

Which, despite looking almost identical to mine, gets a pass.

Does anyone know why this might be happening? What’s different between my install, and the meta site, that one passes and the other doesn’t.

Cheers.

2

Huh, it doesn’t display my discourse installation’s site at all. Strange.

3

I believe this was covered at some length in

https://meta.discourse.org/t/google-webmaster-tools-warns-of-mobile-usability-issues-due-to-images-in-topics/23974

4

That thread is about images, but the error message I’m getting relates to links being too close together.

5

Might have to do with your CSS edits.

I have the default theme with just a few slight minor changes and I have the same result as this meta.discourse. It works just fine.

6

It looks like talk.birmingham has this CSS for links that I don’t see for meta

background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent;

I don’t know if that would give links too less of a distinct tap target, but maybe?

7

Thanks for the suggestions. I’m doing a tidy up of my CSS soon, I’ll see if that makes a difference.

8

The category pages have a warning in this test for me saying the links are too near. I also have a few topics with a warning for horizontal scroll. I am using version v1.4.0.beta10 +273 with a not used adsense plugin, and the discourse-tagging plugin. No custom css/html.