Websites

Is my website mobile friendly?

Almost everyone looking for a local business is doing it on a phone. Your website can look completely finished on your laptop and still be losing you the job on the device your customers actually hold. Here is how to check yours properly, in about a minute, and what to do about what you find.

Why the laptop view is the one nobody sees

Most small business owners built or approved their website sitting at a desk. That is the version burned into your memory, and it is the version you check when you want to feel good about it. But someone searching for a plumber, a barber or a cafe is almost always doing it standing up, one handed, on a phone, often on a patchy signal. That is the real test, and it is a completely different experience.

It matters for search as well as for people. Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a site when deciding what to index and rank, so a site that behaves badly on a phone is at a disadvantage before a customer even sees it.

The 60-second check, in order

Do this on your own phone, right now. Turn wi-fi off first so you are on mobile data, because that is what a customer out and about will be using.

1. Time the load. If you are still looking at a blank screen after a few seconds, a good number of people have already gone back to the search results.
2. Read the first paragraph without touching the screen. If you need to pinch and zoom to read it, the text is too small.
3. Open the menu. Tap the menu button. Does it open, and can you actually hit the links with a thumb without catching the wrong one?
4. Tap your phone number. It should open the dialler straight away. If nothing happens, every customer who wanted to call you has to memorise the number and type it in.
5. Try your contact form or booking button. Fill it in as if you were a customer, and check the enquiry actually arrives.
6. Scroll sideways. If the page slides left and right, something is wider than the screen and the layout is broken.

Any one of those failing is enough to lose a customer who was ready to get in touch. They will not email you to say your menu is broken, they will just go back and tap the next business on the list.

The tap-to-call problem is more common than you think

A phone number on a website should be a link, so one tap opens the dialler with the number already in it. Plenty of small business sites just have the number typed out as plain text, which looks identical but does nothing when tapped. I have also seen sites where the number was a link but pointed at an old or wrong number, so every tap quietly went somewhere else entirely. That is invisible from a laptop and invisible in your analytics.

I wrote up a real example of exactly this in the website visibility audit case study, where a working, decent looking site had a "Call Us" button dialling the wrong area code.

What "mobile friendly" actually means

It does not mean a separate mobile website. That was the old approach, usually on an m. address, and it left businesses maintaining two sites that slowly drifted apart. A modern site should be responsive: one website that rearranges itself to fit whatever screen it lands on, from a large monitor down to an older phone.

In practice that means text that stays readable without zooming, buttons big enough for a thumb, images that scale down instead of forcing the page sideways, and a menu that works by tapping rather than hovering.

Speed counts double on a phone

A page that feels quick on your office broadband can crawl on mobile data. The usual culprit is images: photos straight off a phone or camera are far bigger than a website needs, and a page with several of them can be slow to load on a normal connection. Resizing images properly is often the single biggest speed improvement available, and it costs nothing but time.

If you want the objective version of the check above, run your address through my free website speed and mobile test. It scores your site on mobile as well as desktop and flags performance, SEO and accessibility problems. It is free, powered by Google, and there is no sign-up.

If your site fails the check

Some of it you can fix yourself, particularly oversized images and a phone number that is not a proper link. If the layout itself breaks on a phone, that is usually a sign the site was built on an old template or was never designed responsively, and patching it tends to cost more than it saves.

If you want someone to look at it properly, a Website Health Check (£149, credited back if you go ahead with the work) covers exactly this: what is broken, what it is costing you, and an honest view on whether it is worth fixing or rebuilding. Straightforward mobile and layout fixes start from £199.

The short version

Open your site on your phone, on mobile data, and try to be a customer for sixty seconds. Read it, open the menu, tap the number, send yourself an enquiry. Most sites that fail do so on one of those four, and every one of them is fixable.

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