Today’s post is super short but super useful and immediately actionable. A couple of months ago I found a really cool trick that can help you instantly make sure your website looks great to everyone, so I’m going to share it with you today.
It’s no secret that people are using their mobile devices more and more and that you need your company’s website to look great whether someone’s visiting on their laptop, their tablet, or their cell phone but testing out the look of your site on a million different devices is super tedious and can be tough if you don’t actually own all of those devices yourself.
Well, fear not anxious entrepreneurs, I’ve found the solution. This is probably an old tool but I only found it this spring so I figured I can’t be the only one who didn’t know.
All you have to do to check how your website looks on different mobile devices is to open up your laptop and visit your site using Google Chrome as your browser. Then, simply click Control+Shift+C while no text is highlighted and some cool Googlyness will open up on the screen. In the top left of that Google panel, click on the little image of the cell phone and Chrome will show you what your website looks like on a cell phone. Go to the dropdown menu where it says device and you can choose from a whole list of devices. Choose one and Chrome will show you how your site looks to anyone viewing it on that device. You can also choose a network from the other drop down and select different connection speeds if you’re worried about load time for your site on a device or in an area with slower data.
Watch the full episode above to see a video demo of how to do this.
If you see any issues, you can either hop into your website editor and make the changes yourself or point out the problems you see to the person in charge of maintaining your site and get them corrected so that your visitors will have a better experience in the future.
I just thought this was super cool and super useful when I discovered it, so I wanted to share it with you all.I hope it helps!
thanks for sharing this article. really a good way and useful one too.
You’re welcome!
I just discovered this and I like the way you did not include the technical jargon, nice styling.
Check out the +alias feature of gmail, as well. Great for testing a site that needs a login. Everything connects to your original email address. Really slick.
Thanks for the tip, Charles!