Start with what they came for
Somebody looking up a local business on a phone almost always wants one of three things: are you open, where are you, what is the number. Everything else — your history, your values, the photograph of a handshake — is for the small minority who are still reading after that. Mobile-friendly is not really a design question. It is whether those three answers arrive in the first screen without being hunted for.
The tests that matter
Test on a real phone, on mobile data
Not a narrow browser window on your desktop, and not on your own wifi standing next to the router. Those two shortcuts hide the two worst problems: tap targets that are fine for a mouse and useless for a thumb, and a page that takes nine seconds on a normal connection.
Can you read it without zooming?
Body text wants to be around 16 pixels or more. Anything smaller and people pinch, and pinching is the moment a good share of them give up. This is the most common single fault we find on dated small business sites.
Is everything tappable actually tappable?
Buttons and links want to be about 44 pixels square with space around them. Phone numbers as plain text are a failure: on a phone a number should dial when tapped, and an address should open in Maps.
Does anything scroll sideways?
If the page slides left and right, something inside it is wider than the screen — usually a table, an embedded map or an oversized image. It feels broken, and people treat it as broken.
Where the speed actually goes
Photographs, almost always
A picture straight off a phone or a camera can be four or five megabytes. Displayed at 600 pixels wide it needs to be a fraction of that. One page with six of those on it is the difference between one second and nine. Resizing them is the single highest-value hour anybody can spend on an old site.
Plugins and scripts nobody uses
Old sites accumulate them: a slider that is no longer on any page, a chat widget from a service that shut down, three analytics tags from three different people who worked on it. Each one costs a round trip before anything appears.
Fonts, if nobody was watching
Four weights of two different typefaces, each fetched from someone else’s server. Two weights of one typeface, served from your own domain, looks the same to a customer and loads faster.
A short checklist
- Phone number is a tap-to-call link in the header of every page
- Hours and address visible without scrolling on the homepage
- Body text 16px or larger, buttons around 44px
- No sideways scrolling on a 390px-wide screen
- Every image resized to roughly the size it displays at
- Page opens in about a second on mobile data
- Contact form that has actually been tested from a phone
Why Google cares as well
It indexes the phone version of your site
Google looks at the mobile version of a page when deciding what to do with it. A site that is fine on a desktop and painful on a phone is being judged on the painful one.
Speed is a ranking factor, but conversion matters more
The ranking effect of speed is real and modest. The effect on whether a visitor stays long enough to call you is much larger. Fix it for the second reason and take the first as a bonus.
If this is a longer job than an afternoon
On a lot of older sites the layout cannot be made to reflow without rebuilding it, and no amount of resizing images gets round that. A rebuild from $400 keeps your address, your words and your rankings and fixes the layout underneath. Send us your web address and we will tell you which of the two you are looking at, free, before you spend anything.