Choose your mobile configuration

Select your mobile configuration

Google recognizes three different configurations for building mobile sites.

Here’s a chart comparing the three methods:

Configuration Does my URL stay the same? Does my HTML stay the same?
Responsive Web Design Yes Yes
Dynamic Serving Yes No
Separate URLs No No

  1. Responsive web design: Serves the same HTML code on the same URL regardless of the users’ device (desktop, tablet, mobile, non-visual browser), but can render the display differently (i.e., “respond”) based on the screen size. Responsive design is Google’s recommended design pattern.

  2. Dynamic serving: Uses the same URL regardless of device, but generates a different version of HTML for different device types based on what the server knows about the user’s browser.

  3. Separate URLs: Serves different code to each device, and on separate URLs. This configuration tries to detect the users’ device, then redirects to the appropriate page using HTTP redirects] along with the Vary HTTP header.

Google does not favor any particular URL format as long as the page(s) and all page assets are accessible to all Googlebot user-agents.

For more information on selecting a mobile site configuration (and weighing the pros and cons of each option), please see “Building Websites for the Multi-Screen Consumer”.

Next Sections

  1. Understand different devices
  2. Understand key points in going mobile
  3. Select your mobile configuration
  4. Frequently asked questions

Updated on 2014-08-07