A lot of people will see your website for the first time on a phone. They’re standing in a parking lot in Stow, or on the couch after dinner, looking up who can fix the thing that broke. If you don’t have a mobile friendly website, one that’s easy to use on that small screen, they back out and call the next name on the list.
The good news is you don’t need special software to find out whether you have a mobile friendly website. You can check the basics yourself in about five minutes. Here’s how I do it, what to look for, and what’s worth fixing first.
Step 1: Pull it up on your own phone
Start with the simplest test. Open your website on your phone, the way a customer would: search your business name in Google and tap the result instead of typing the address.
Then just use it for a minute. Try to do the things a customer would do:
- Find your phone number and tap it. Does it start a call?
- Find what services you offer.
- Find your hours or service area.
- Open the menu and go to another page.
- Fill out the contact form, or at least start to.
If you had to pinch, zoom, or scroll sideways to do any of that, make a note. Those are the problems customers hit too.
Step 2: Try a different phone
Your phone isn’t everyone’s phone. If you have an iPhone, borrow a family member’s Android, or the other way around. Try a smaller phone if you can. Things that look fine on a large screen sometimes fall apart on a smaller one, like buttons that overlap or text that runs off the edge.
Also turn the phone sideways once. It’s not the main way people browse, but it can reveal layout problems.
Step 3: Use your computer’s browser tools
Most desktop browsers can pretend to be a phone. In Chrome or Edge, right-click on your page, choose Inspect, and look for a small icon that looks like a phone and tablet. That switches to a device view where you can pick different screen sizes.
Chrome also includes a report called Lighthouse in that same panel. Run it on the mobile setting and it will flag things like text that’s too small, tap targets that are too close together, and pages that load slowly. Don’t worry about getting a perfect score. Use it as a list of things to look into.
What a mobile friendly website gets right
When a site works well on a phone, you’ll usually notice these things without thinking about them:
- Text is readable without zooming. You shouldn’t need to squint.
- Buttons are big enough to tap. And they aren’t jammed so close together that you hit the wrong one.
- The phone number is tappable. One tap starts a call.
- Nothing scrolls sideways. The page fits the width of the screen.
- The menu works. It opens, closes, and every link goes somewhere.
- Pop-ups don’t block everything. If there’s a pop-up, it’s easy to close on a small screen.
- It loads reasonably fast, even on a cellular connection.
Common problems and what causes them
Here are the issues I run into most often when I check small business sites around Summit County:
- Old, non-responsive design. Sites built a long time ago were often made for desktop only. The whole page shrinks down to fit, and everything is tiny.
- Huge images. A photo straight off a modern camera can be enormous. On a phone connection, that means a slow, blank screen.
- Forms that are painful. Too many fields, tiny boxes, or a submit button hidden off to the side.
- Embedded content that doesn’t resize. Old maps, videos, or tables that stick out past the edge of the screen.
- Chat widgets and banners stacked on top of each other, covering the content people came to see.
Some of these are quick fixes. Others, especially the first one, usually mean it’s time for a redesign rather than a patch.
What to fix first
If you found a handful of problems, start with the ones that stop people from contacting you:
- Make sure the phone number is visible near the top and tappable.
- Make sure the contact form works on a phone from start to finish. Send yourself a test.
- Fix anything that makes the menu hard to use.
- Shrink oversized images.
- Then clean up smaller layout and text issues.
If speed is one of your problems, my post on why website speed matters goes deeper on what slows sites down.
Questions I hear a lot
How do I check if my website is mobile friendly?
Open it on a couple of different phones and try to call, find services, and use the contact form. Then run the Lighthouse report in Chrome’s Inspect panel on the mobile setting for a list of technical issues.
Does Google care if my site works on phones?
Yes. Google looks at the mobile version of your site when deciding how to show it in search, so a site that’s hard to use on a phone can hold you back.
Can I make my old website mobile friendly without starting over?
Sometimes. If the site is built on a modern platform, a theme update or some layout fixes may do it. If it was built for desktop only, a rebuild is often simpler and cheaper in the long run.
If you’d rather not do it alone
If you’d like someone to try your site on a few devices and tell you plainly what’s worth fixing, the free website check is a sensible first step. When a site needs more than a patch, that’s the kind of work I do through web design and hosting.