Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly? (It Probably Isn't)

Here's a stat that should bother you:

If your website doesn't work properly on a phone, you're turning away more than half your potential customers before they've even read a word.

And "doesn't work properly" doesn't just mean broken layouts. It means text that's too small to read without zooming. Buttons that are too close together to tap. Images that take ten seconds to load on 4G. Navigation menus that don't open. Forms that are impossible to fill in.

The Quick Audit

You can check most of this yourself in about five minutes. Open your website on your phone — not your laptop, your actual phone — and try to do the things a customer would do.

• Can you read the text without zooming? If you're pinching to zoom, the font size is wrong.
• Can you tap every button and link easily? If links are crammed together and you keep hitting the wrong one, your tap targets are too small.
• Does the page load in under 3 seconds? Time it. If you're waiting, so are your customers — and most of them won't wait.
• Does the navigation menu work? Open it, close it, tap every link. If the hamburger menu doesn't respond, you've lost people.
• Can you fill in a contact form? Try it. If the fields are tiny or the keyboard covers the submit button, nobody's filling that in.

Why This Happens

Most of the time, mobile-unfriendly websites weren't built badly on purpose. They were either built years ago when mobile wasn't the priority, or they were built on desktop and nobody tested on a real phone.

Some sites are technically "responsive" but still awful to use on mobile. The layout reshuffles, but images are still 4MB each, the hero section takes up three screens of scrolling, and critical content is buried below the fold.

What to Fix First

If your site fails the quick audit above, here's where to start:

• Font size: Body text should be at least 16px. Anything smaller and mobile browsers will zoom to compensate, breaking your layout.
• Tap targets: Buttons and links should be at least 44×44 pixels. That's Apple's guideline, and it exists for good reason.
• Images: Compress them. A 3MB hero image is never necessary. Use WebP format and lazy loading — most modern site builders support both.
• Navigation: On mobile, a simple hamburger menu with large, well-spaced links beats a mega-menu every time.
• Forms: Reduce the number of fields. On mobile, every extra field is friction. Name, email, message — that's usually enough.

Google Cares About This Too

Since 2021, Google has used mobile-first indexing — meaning it ranks your site based on the mobile version, not the desktop one. If your mobile site is slow, hard to use, or missing content, your search rankings suffer. You can check your score at Google's PageSpeed Insights for free.

If you're weighing up a rebuild, it's worth reading about what a fairly priced website should actually include before you talk to an agency.

We help small businesses across London with exactly this kind of web and digital presence work — fixing the things that quietly cost you customers.