What a mobile friendly test checks
A site can look perfect on the desktop where it was built and still frustrate the phone in a customer's hand. The scan checks the things that decide whether a mobile visitor stays or leaves:
- Readable text. Can someone read your page without pinching and zooming? Text sized for a desktop is often tiny on a phone.
- Tappable buttons. Are your buttons and links big enough, and far enough apart, to tap with a thumb without hitting the wrong one?
- Content that fits the screen. Does everything fit the width of a phone, or do people have to scroll sideways to read a line of text?
- Mobile loading speed. Phones often run on slower connections, so a page that feels fine on broadband can crawl on mobile data.
- Pop-ups and overlays. A banner that is a minor annoyance on a big screen can cover half a phone and hide your enquiry button.
Why the mobile experience decides the enquiry
For most local businesses, the phone is not a secondary way customers find you, it is the main one. Someone searches while out and about, taps your result, and forms an impression in seconds. If they have to zoom to read your prices, hunt for your phone number, or fight a pop-up to reach the contact form, they tap back and try the next business instead. You never see that visitor, which is what makes a poor mobile experience so quietly expensive.
There is a second cost too. Google mainly looks at the mobile version of your site when deciding how you rank. A site that works badly on a phone can therefore rank lower, so fewer people find it in the first place. Mobile problems hit you twice: fewer visitors from Google, and more of the ones you get leaving early.
Mobile friendly test vs checking on your own phone
Opening your site on your own phone is a good first step, and everyone should do it. The limit is that you know your own site too well. You know where the menu hides and which button to press, so you glide past the friction a first-time visitor hits cold. You are also testing one phone on one connection.
PageScore checks the mobile experience objectively and reports it in plain English, then places that result next to your speed, SEO, security and accessibility scores so you see the whole picture in one place. Keep testing on your own phone as well. If you want to know exactly what is getting in a mobile visitor's way and why it matters to your enquiries, run the scan below.
Making your site work on a phone
Most mobile problems trace back to a handful of fixes: use a responsive theme that adapts to the screen, size text so it reads without zooming, space buttons for thumbs, keep content within the screen width, and go easy on pop-ups on small screens. The £29 professional audit report lists every mobile issue on your site in priority order with the fix for each, across all 20 pages. If you would rather have a site built mobile-first from the ground up, the John Hitchens build is a fixed £400, delivered in 2 to 3 days.