Is mobile friendly API necessary to detect non-mobile friendly parts of the site?

[vlexo]

So Google announced that they would increase the significance of their mobile-friendly algorithm with their mobile-friendly tool to aid webmasters.

However, for the much larger and more complex site this isn't scalable.

1. Why did they not release an API so web owners could detect what parts of their site aren't mobile-friendly?
2. Before you mention GWT, that will only allow you to download the top 1,000 results. This isn't useful for a website that has over 100,000 pages with 20% of being not mobile-friendly.

What have other people done to detect whether parts of their site are mobile-friendly or not? That would be really useful.

[goodroi]

For many sites it doesn't matter how many pages they have. It matters how many templates and css files they have. If you fix those core files it will impact a big % if not all of your urls. I tend to look at GWT to identify the sections that haven't had their templates updated. There might be some urls that need special attention and I can find those pages using GWT after I have updated the templates which would clear out 99%ish of the troubled urls.

The other option is to use your own bot to crawl your own site looking for bad code, which I also like to do.

[vlexo]

I realise this, but the site I work on uses multiple Content Management Systems that stupidly sit under the same subdirectories. That complicates things because at that stage they all use different templates (although they all look the same).

One way around this is using ScreamingFrog to crawl and identify pages on the site that contain mobile variables such as a viewport setting. I then verified by spot checking if sections were mobile-friendly or not by using the tool. Worked out for me, but was a long process to get it accurate to my own satisfaction.

[rish3]

There is an API, it's just not well advertised. It's the Google pagespeed api.

Here's an example URL. You'll need an api key (see below) for it to work.

[googleapis.com...]

If you go to the Google developers console, and create a project, grant access to the pagespeed api, and generate a key, you can perform up to 25,000 queries per day.