Remember those old Netscape browsers? Looking back, they represented the first big online browser everyone knew about. Moreover, they ultimately developed what is now the most popular programming language in the world: JavaScript.

JavaScript allows programmers to do all kinds of cool things on your website, such as these examples here. Unfortunately, your SEO team may have received one of those infamous “Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files on yourwebsite.com” warning letters—or perhaps you’ve noticed the same as the contact owner for your domain.

Why Does Google Care about Unblocking JavaScript?

Google’s spider—which constantly searches and indexes your website pages in its archive—must be able to completely render every page for proper indexing. This is notably important for mobile users, specifically, and affects your search rankings!

When your SEO blocks JavaScript, Google can’t index and rank your web pages appropriately. With so many pages viewed via mobile search, this can impact traffic, leads, and sales you get from your site.

There’s no clear explanation as to the reason for this, but Google did add this as a requirement to their technical guidelines: which means they’re definitely taking it seriously with respect to ranking websites.

Pinpointing all blocked web pages and resources on your website isn’t easy or obvious. Why? Because WordPress plugins can cause this to happen without your knowledge. Check out this walkthrough designed to help your SEO expert take on this seemingly daunting task.

Make Sure You Have a Good SEO Company

Any SEO company worth its salt would have already taken these steps after original warnings were issued years ago, knowing the powers that be at Google always follow through on what they say (though not always quickly or publicly).

If your SEO company falls short in this regard, switch to an alternative who has your best interests in mind.