Google's mobile-friendly test - couldn't load resources

Question

Google's mobile-friendly test states my web site is not mobile-friendly.

It states that the content is wider than the screen and clickable elements are too close together. Drilling down it is because lots of files are not being loaded by GoogleBot. I do not understand why this is happening. It is nothing to do with robots.txt as nothing is being blocked. I have also tested it so it is definitely not robots related.

So there is a great big list of files that it can't load. Types include .js .ttf .woff .css .jpg .png.

Even more puzzling is how these failed files change by time. I might get 33 files one minute, 5 mins later it is 35, an hour later it is 26.

Any ideas what it might be?

For what it's worth, in the real world there are no issues with mobile devices, only with how Googlebot sees things.

Cila

Found an answer by now? I'm having exactly the same issues on 20+ websites. – Eichmann

I believe that this is happening because the Google Bot has a timer to download the files, and if it exceeds that time, it just gives up. However, I think it's buggy at the moment, because none of my files exceed 200kb. Or is it that 200kb is huge for a CSS file? – Cameleer

Answer 1

If the Status says "Other error", there seems to be no clear reason for it but appears to happen for heavy sites loading a lot of resources. I had the same issue and after a lot of searching this answer helped me.

To summarise it, it could just happen if a lot of resources are being loaded. As the link above states, it could actually mimic a real user on a slow mobile connection.

Also, please note that the "content is wider than the screen" and "clickable elements are too close together" might still be real issues even if everything loaded correctly. (For me, the loading issue was happening intermittently on the Mobile-friendly test, but the two issues above still persisted even when everything loaded up correctly)

Moralez

Answer 2

The first step would be to make sure those resources are not actually blocked by your robot.txt file. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/robots-testing-tool

If you are using WordPress Assuming the resources that are blocked are passing on the robot testing tool, you can install the plugin below which aggregates, minifies and caches scripts and styles - https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/autoptimize/

Chanell