What Mobile-Friendly Really Means — Test Yours in 30 Seconds

Most of the people looking at your website are holding a phone, standing up, often in a hurry. "Mobile-friendly" is not a badge you earn once. It is whether a customer can get what they came for with one thumb.

Test yours in 30 seconds, on cell data

Turn wifi off, open your site on your phone, and try four things:

1. Can you see the phone number without scrolling? Can you tap it?
2. Can you read the first sentence without pinching to zoom?
3. Does the page appear in under three seconds?
4. If there is a form, can you fill it with one thumb, without the keyboard covering the button?

If any of those four fail, the site is losing calls. Not maybe. It is the first thing every visitor does.

The four failures, and the fixes

1. The phone number is not tappable

The fix: put the number in the header, as a tap-to-call link, on every page. It costs nothing and it is the single highest-value change most small business sites can make.

2. The text is too small

Sixteen pixels minimum for body copy, and never grey text on a white background at ten pixels. If the reader has to zoom, they leave.

3. The form is a job

Name, phone, one line about the job, send. Every extra field costs you completions. Use the phone keyboard for phone numbers so the right keys appear, and never hide the submit button behind the on-screen keyboard.

4. It is heavy

Big uncompressed photos are the usual cause of a slow phone page. A hero image should be a few hundred kilobytes, not five megabytes. If your site was built with images straight off a camera, that is your problem right there.

The habit that keeps it fixed

Once a month, do the 30-second test again on a different phone. Send somebody the site and ask them to find your number and your prices without help. If they cannot, the site needs work, and it is usually an afternoon's work rather than a rebuild.

Seven in ten visits are on a phone. Design for the thumb first and the desktop gets easier, not harder.

If your site fails the test and you would rather not do it yourself, the three builds we offer are written for the phone first.