“Is my website mobile friendly?” is one of the most useful questions a small business owner can ask, because the honest answer is often “sort of”. The site technically shrinks to fit a phone, but ringing you, reading a price or sending the form is harder than it should be.
Google retired its standalone Mobile-Friendly Test some time ago, so the check is now a mix of a free tool and, more usefully, your own thumb. It takes about ten minutes.
Step 1: use it on your own phone, like a customer would
No tool beats this. Turn off wifi so you are on mobile data, open your website from a Google search (not a bookmark), and try to do the three things a customer does:
- Find out whether you do the job they need, in their area.
- Find a rough price or what affects it.
- Ring you or send a quote request, using one hand.
What to look for while you do it
| What you notice | Why it matters | Usual cause |
|---|---|---|
| You have to pinch to zoom to read text | People give up rather than zoom | Old fixed-width design, or text too small |
| The page scrolls sideways | Feels broken and hides content | An image, table or embed wider than the screen |
| Buttons and links are hard to hit | Wrong taps, frustration | Tap targets too small or too close together |
| The phone number is not tappable | The easiest enquiry is lost | Number written as plain text or inside an image |
| Content jumps as the page loads | People tap the wrong thing | Images and banners without reserved space |
| A pop-up covers the page | Hard to close on a small screen | Cookie banners or offers designed for desktop |
| The menu, prices or brochure is a PDF | Unreadable on a phone | Content never moved onto the site itself |
Step 2: run PageSpeed Insights
Go to PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev), paste in your address and leave it on the “Mobile” tab. Google’s documentation explains that it reports two kinds of data: lab data from Lighthouse, which simulates a page load on a mid-range phone on a mobile network, and field data from real Chrome users over the previous 28 days, if your site has enough visitors to have any.
Small local sites often have no field data, which is normal. The lab results still show you the problems. Look at the Performance score, then scroll down to the “Diagnose performance issues” section and the Accessibility and Best Practices results, which catch things like small tap targets, low-contrast text and images without descriptions.
Step 3: check it in Chrome on your computer
If you are comfortable doing so, Chrome’s developer tools (right-click, Inspect, then the phone-and-tablet icon) let you preview the site at different phone sizes and run Lighthouse directly. It is the same engine as PageSpeed Insights, just on your machine. You do not need this step, but it is handy for checking a fix before and after.
What to fix first
Not everything a tool flags is equally important. In order of impact on enquiries:
- Make the phone number a tap-to-call link and keep it on screen.
- Shrink oversized photos. This is usually the biggest cause of a slow mobile site.
- Replace PDFs with real page content.
- Remove or tame pop-ups that cover the page on a phone.
- Make buttons big enough to hit with a thumb, with space around them.
- Stop content jumping by giving images and banners fixed dimensions.
When it needs a rebuild rather than a fix
If your site was built before phones were the main way people browse, it may have been designed for a desktop screen and squeezed down afterwards. You can patch individual problems, but if everything on the list above fails, a rebuild designed for a phone first is often quicker and cheaper than fixing a layout that fights you at every step.
The test is simple. If you would be embarrassed to hand your phone to a customer with your website open, the site is costing you work.