Broken mobile phone

Mobile Usability Issues Detected – But Everything Looks OK?

If you got an email saying “New Mobile Usability issues detected for site” there’s a good chance nothing is wrong with your site.

There is a Google bug that has been around for a couple of years now, where Google Search Console will issue a “Mobile Usability issues detected” warning when the reported page is actually fine (yup, even Google has bugs sometimes!).

But here’s how to make sure everything definitely is OK.

What Does the ‘Mobile Usability Issues’ Message Look Like

Firstly, this is what the ‘your site is broken on mobile’ message looks like:-

Mobile usability issues email

So it’s these two ‘issues’ that suggest the site isn’t working properly on mobile:-

  • Clickable elements too close together
  • Text too small to read

Just to be clear – you will correctly get these messages if your site is genuinely NOT mobile friendly. So never ignore them if you’re not sure!

How To Check if the ‘Mobile Usability Issues Detected’ Message Is Wrong

In the email you received from Google click the big blue ‘Fix Mobile Usability issues’ button. This will take you to Google Search Console, and load the ‘Mobile Usability’ report page for your website.

Google Mobile Usability Report page

Here you can see those two warning messages (from the email) again, and the number of pages Google currently thinks have this problem.

It’s not obvious you can do this, but now click on one of the error rows in the ‘Details’ section of the report (either one is fine). This will take you to a new page with more information:-

Mobile usability breakdown report

The important part here is the ‘Examples’ section which tells you exactly which page(s) Google says are a problem.

Again it’s not obvious, but click on a row in the ‘Examples’ section and a sidebar will pop out:-

Usability sidebar popout

Now click on the ‘Test Live Page’ option. A new browser tab will open for Google’s ‘Mobile-Friendly Test’ and the live page will be automatically tested.

This typically takes about 30 seconds to run. Once completed the screen will show an image of how Google sees your website using a mobile device together with a ‘red’ or ‘green’ report of whether your page is mobile friendly or not.

This is what good news looks like:-

If your page fails this test and you get the red not mobile friendly message, then see below.

Assuming your page has been reported as fine (despite the email saying it wasn’t!), now close the ‘mobile-friendly test’ window to get back to Search Console. Then click the ‘Validate Fix’ button at the top of the previous screen:-

Google will pop up a message saying ‘performing quick initial validation’ (for about a minute), before eventually saying ‘validation started’:-

They will also send you an email to confirm they are ‘validating your fixes’.

Note: you don’t need to do this for each URL as Google assumes you ‘fixed’ all pages affected by that error. You can do ‘Validate Fix’ for the other of the two error messages but it’s not really necessary.

How Long Before Search Console Reports This Fixed?

Google will send you an email to confirm that the problem is fixed (even though you haven’t actually changed anything). Typically this will take a day or so.

Here’s the email to look out for:-

Yeah, thanks Google. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Note: on rare occasions you’ll get an email saying the fix failed. This is actually just the same bug, so simply submit it again. The best we’ve ever scored is 2 times in a row, and only on the 3rd time was it reported as ‘fixed’ despite no changes being made to the site at all!

Update: March 2022

Not only does this bug still exist, it now seems to be even worse.

On clicking ‘Validate Fix’ we’re now seeing an immediate ‘Cannot continue validation process’ message. Google thinks the problem is still there and refuses to move on. This is despite the page passing Google’s own Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

Cannot continue validation process

We persisted with this one getting the same problem for a couple of days. Then only on day 3 did the Validate Fix button trigger the ‘Validation started’ process. The usual confirmation email arrived, and next day the ‘successfully fixed’ email (as usual no changes were made to the page at all between Google reporting a Mobile Usability Issue and then confirming it was fixed).

Update: April 2023

Starting from December 2023 the ‘Mobile Usability’ report is being retired. Which will come as a relief to many who are fed up with inaccurate warnings from this report (as Google put it “many other robust resources for evaluating mobile usability have emerged”).

To be clear though mobile usability is still critically important if you want Google traffic, and it will still be part of Google’s concept of ‘page experience’.

What if My site Is Genuinely NOT Mobile Friendly?

If your site fails Google’s ‘Mobile-friendly test’ then that is definitely something to be concerned about. Because this will greatly affect your ranking in Google search results. Also bear in mind typically around 60% of most websites visitors are on a mobile device – so this is likely to be very similar for your site unless there’s a very good reason why not.

Failing the test can apply just to certain pages of a website, or it can affect an entire website. So fixing it can range from being fairly simple to quite complex. Either way you will likely need a web developer to make the necessary changes and verify that there are no other problems.

Related Issue: “Video outside the viewport”

This appears to be another related problem that Google may be reporting incorrectly. It starts with a warning email from Google stating “Video page indexing issues detected” with more detail provided as “The specific issue validated was ‘Video outside the viewport'”.

But similarly to the mobile friendly test this one can also go away without any changes being made. We got a report on 28th July, clicked the ‘Validate Fixed’ button without making any changes to the page, and received a “Video page indexing issues successfully fixed for site” message on 8th August. Again, no changes made to the page at all.

How To Fix ‘Video outside the viewport’

Also note that the error reported here ‘Video outside the viewport’ does not mean what a lot of people seem to think. It does NOT mean the video has to be in the initial viewport (i.e. fully in view when the page is first loaded). It can be lower down the page.

This error means the video is appearing outside of the renderable area of the page (as Google state here). Which means the page/video is not adapting correctly to different screen sizes and the video is overflowing outside of the visible screen area.

So assuming you really do have this error (and it’s not being reported incorrectly as above) then fixing it requires code changes either to the way videos are being embedded into your page. Or changes to the theme/layout of your site.

21 thoughts on “Mobile Usability Issues Detected – But Everything Looks OK?”

  1. Very good information… I was getting an error msg for many days on mobile… PAGE IS NOT MOBILE FRIENDLY.

    Thank you for this guide… This is so helpful.

    Reply
  2. Thank you for the detail! My issue is when I run a URL inspect via GSC on the “affected” pages I receive the “Page Is Mobile Friendly” green-bar of joy. However, when I go to run validation to resolve the errors, it still returns that the errors are present. This is despite the fact that the tool just said the pages are good. Any advice?

    Reply
    • How many times have you run ‘validate fix’? Incredibly Google can still get it wrong when it retries – so try running validate fix again, and you’ll most probably find it works (even if it takes 2 or 3 attempts!).

      Reply
  3. Great, thank you!! Really appreciate this clear and concise guide. Was going crazy trying to figure out what was going on. I was able to run the mobile friendly test and start the validation process, so hopefully it will work out now!

    Reply
  4. Thanks for this guide as it was very helpful. However I had one question to ask.

    In the google search console, under the coverage section, I have 3 pages stating as: Crawled – currently not indexed. When I checked further, the mobile friendliness test failed all for 3 pages. But there is no sign to validate fix. Maybe it is just for indexed pages?

    Reply
    • It sounds like you’re using the separate Google Mobile Friendly Test tool – which won’t have the validate fix option.
      You can try asking Google to recrawl those pages. Enter the url in the inspect bar at the top, which will report the page as ‘URL is not on Google’. Then click the ‘Request Indexing’ link.

      Reply
  5. I have fixed everything with my designer and I’m 100% sure that I’ve followed all the rules. Still there’s an error: content wider than screen. Is it possible that Google could be wrong? Can I contact Google support for this?

    Reply
    • Yes, it is possible that it’s wrong (and actually quite likely) as explained above. But no, Google won’t provide support for this. Although it would be nice if they fixed their tool so it didn’t provide incorrect reports. 🙂

      Did you try the Validate Fix option mentioned here? You may need to try it more than once.

      Or just ignore the message and it will likely go away on it’s own in a week or so (unless there is still a layout problem of course).

      Reply
  6. Thanks, this guide is so beneficial. I’ve tested everything is OK, but GSC still: Text too small to read, content wider than the screen

    Reply
    • If everything is definitely OK, then you can safely ignore it – in time Google will just decide there is no problem. Even Google has bugs. 🙂
      If it bothers you though, you can try to ‘Validate Fix’ again – sometimes it takes up to 3 times to get Google to confirm there is no problem after all.

      Reply
  7. Hi,

    If you’re sure everything is fine and it passed the validation but then reports an error weeks later will that affect the search rankings (even if it’s due to Google’s bug)?

    Thank you.

    Reply
    • It shouldn’t and we’ve not actually seen this impact search rankings. But that’s not to say it couldn’t. They do figure it out in the end though.

      Reply
  8. Now the problem is, Google will NOT validate the fix if only just one URL “fails” the test.

    Let’s say you have 5 URLs as not “mobile-friendly” (although they are).

    And then when validating, Google themselves will auto run a mobile test on them. If just one fails, it means you cannot continue.

    What to do?

    Reply
    • It is super annoying. But I don’t believe they pre-check all of the URLs, so if you had 50 being reported they would still only check a few up front before accepting them all to retest.

      But all you can do is try it again. Or just leave it as Google do try again themselves – numerous times we’ve seen the errors just go away again without them ever being resubmitted. The timescale varies though.

      Reply
  9. It seems Google is like the government. It doesn’t listen. How they allow these bugs to continue I can’t comprehend (feeling better now I’ve had a rant).

    Reply
  10. I get one of these emails every so often and just wind up ignoring it. “Viewport not set” except yes it is. It’s been set for years. Google team should read The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I don’t waste my time with them any more trying to make their bugs dance.

    Reply
  11. Hello everyone! I fixed the issues that I think brought the “not mobile-friendly”, I still get the cannot continue validation process after some days, I’m not that concerned about it after reading this post.

    But I tested my page with the isse using the https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly/ tool, and it shows the same issues. This when I should be worried? Or this just another bug on top of the other one?

    I use a page template for the page with the mobile-friendly issue. It means that other identical pages with the same template should have this issue as well, but they don’t, so I’m assuming that it’s a bug. Thanks in advance!

    Reply
    • If a page fails when using Google’s ‘Mobile-friendly test’ tool then you probably do have a problem. I’ve never seen that tool fail without a genuine reason.

      You said you’d ‘fixed the issues’ so I understand changes have been made. In which case make sure all caching has been cleared so Google is definitely seeing the updated version of the page. If there’s still a problem, you can try viewing the page using Chrome’s mobile preview. That should show the page in the same way Google sees it. But if you’re still stuck we can take a look and help with fixing it.

      Reply

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