Not built for phones
Your site was never built for phones, and most people who look you up are on one.
How to see it yourself, in a minute
- Open your site on a phone.
- If you see a tiny version of the desktop page and have to pinch to read it, the site was never told the screen was small.
- Google's Search Console will also list the pages under Mobile Usability, if you have it connected.
Or paste your address into the free audit, which checks this and seventeen other faults in ten seconds.
Why it matters
More than six in ten visits to a local business site come from a phone. A site without a mobile layout shows a shrunken desktop page that needs pinching to read, and Google indexes the mobile version first, so it also ranks lower.
More than six in ten visits to a local business site are from a phone. A page that needs pinching loses most of them before they read a word, and since Google indexes the mobile version of a site first, the desktop version being fine does not help the rankings. For most businesses this is the single biggest leak on the list.
How we fix it
We rebuild the templates to work at every screen size, test on real phones, and make the call and enquiry buttons the easiest things to reach with a thumb.
- Add the viewport declaration and the responsive rules the site never had, or rebuild the templates if they were built with fixed widths, which is usually the case.
- Make the phone number and the enquiry button the easiest things to hit with a thumb.
- Test on real phones, iOS and Android, not only in a desktop emulator.
- Recheck Core Web Vitals afterwards: a site that has never been mobile has usually never been fast either.
How long: One to three days depending on the size of the site, or part of a rebuild.
Questions people ask about this
- Can it be fixed without a rebuild?
- Sometimes. If the site was built with fixed pixel widths and tables, the honest answer is a rebuild at the Presence tier; a day of patching produces a site that half works on a phone.
- Our customers are older; they use desktops.
- The data says otherwise for almost every trade, and the people who look you up on a phone are the ones standing in front of the problem you fix.
- Does Google really care?
- It indexes the mobile version first. If the mobile version is unusable, that is the version being ranked.
People usually find this page by searching
- “website not mobile friendly”
- “make website work on phone”
- “mobile responsive website fix”
Has your site got it?
Paste your address. This and seventeen other faults, checked in seconds.
Free, on screen in about ten seconds, no call. We fetch your homepage once, the way a visitor's browser does, and nothing else.
Or fix the lot at once
If the audit finds five or more, a rebuild is usually cheaper than five fixes. Prices are on the page.