Mobile Usability Errors

[infotech]

My site has been getting some Mobile Usability errors on quite a lot of pages.

Google only shows affected pages, not where error lies on the page.

When I test the live page individually using their tool, it doesn't show any error.

I suspect clickable elements issue could be due to breadcrumbs or category links on the page. e.g links with anchors text like tv, cnn. Wider content due to some images with large width.

Is their any way or any tool to pinpoint the problem?

 

[jäger]

I've noticed these errors pop up on several sites over the past 6 months. Honestly, I think it's broken.

Errors will pop up on pages I haven't changed, and when I then initiate "re-validate" it gives me the OK after a few days of brewing. Again, on the unchanged pages.

Right now I have several error pages in the console, even though they have been "validated". It's annoying and triggering up my OCD a bit, but other than that I've seen no negative effects. Traffic is the same, so I just ignore it after I've re-validated the errors.

 

[mmm91492]

I've noticed these errors pop up on several sites over the past 6 months. Honestly, I think it's broken.

I've run into similar issues recently, and the manual validation hasn't really been much help either. Sometimes it just fails to load all of the site files, and a missing stylesheet obviously causes all sorts of mobile usability errors. I'm not sure if this is intentional like some of their other attempts to "emulate a slow cell connection," but I'd agree that the test isn't 100% accurate right now.

 

[Ryuzaki]

The Mobile-Friendly Test is broken and confirmed broken. You're seeing errors in Search Console, which is supposedly not broken. Who knows what's broken or not at this point but Google is aware of the problems. I've found tons of discussions on Twitter and the Google forums and other places.

What's happening is the mobile bot is unable to load various, random resources on each page load. You'll get images 404-ing, you'll get JS and CSS not loading (which leads to text being too small, links being too close together, stuff sticking out of the viewport, etc).

It's a known issue. If these are new errors and you've done nothing to cause them (like change themes or alter some CSS) then I'd just ignore it for the time being and try to stay in the loop on the news of when Google fixes this.

I've run into similar issues recently, and the manual validation hasn't really been much help either. Sometimes it just fails to load all of the site files, and a missing stylesheet obviously causes all sorts of mobile usability errors. I'm not sure if this is intentional like some of their other attempts to "emulate a slow cell connection," but I'd agree that the test isn't 100% accurate right now.

Yeah, this is exactly what's going on. Didn't read it fully before typing my response above. I think the "slow cellular connection" emulation is what's causing the problem. Something in that process is causing immediate time-outs on files, and it's almost always CSS and JS.