How to tell if your website is mobile friendly (and fix it)

Pull out your phone and open your own website. Do you have to pinch and zoom to read anything? Does a button sit just out of reach, or does text run off the edge of the screen? If so, you've got a mobile problem — and it's costing you customers.

For most small businesses, well over half of website visitors now arrive on a phone. Someone searching "cafe near me" over the weekend, checking your opening hours from the couch, or trying to book while standing in your car park is on mobile. If that experience is clunky, they bounce and call the next business instead.

This guide shows you how to tell whether your site genuinely works on mobile, the specific failures to look for, and what to fix first.

Two things are going on. The obvious one is customer experience: a frustrating mobile site loses the sale before you've had a chance. The less obvious one is that Google now uses mobile-first indexing — it primarily looks at the mobile version of your site to decide how you rank. A site that's great on desktop but poor on mobile is being judged on its worst version.

So a bad mobile experience hits you twice: fewer of the visitors you already have convert, and fewer new visitors find you in the first place.

You don't need any special tools to get a strong first read. Start with your own phone, then confirm with a couple of free checks.

• The thumb test — browse your site one-handed. Can you read everything without zooming and tap every button comfortably?
• The resize test — on a computer, drag your browser window narrow. Content should reflow into a single column, not get chopped off or overlap.
• Google PageSpeed Insights — free, gives you a separate mobile score plus specific issues.
• Ask two other people to open it on their phones. Different devices and screen sizes surface problems you won't see on yours.

Most mobile problems fall into a handful of recurring patterns. Once you know what they are, you'll spot them instantly.

• Tiny text that forces zooming — body copy should be readable at arm's length without pinching.
• Buttons and links too small or too close together to tap accurately with a thumb.
• Content running off the screen, forcing you to scroll sideways — usually a fixed-width element or oversized image.
• Pop-ups that can't be closed on a small screen, trapping the visitor before they've seen anything.
• Slow loading because of huge unoptimised images that were sized for desktop.
• Menus that don't work with touch, or a phone number that isn't tappable to call.
• Forms that are painful — fields too small, or the wrong keyboard popping up for email and phone entries.

You don't need to rebuild everything. Fix the things that block a visitor from reading, tapping or contacting you, then tidy the rest.

The foundation is a responsive design — one that automatically adapts to screen size rather than a separate mobile site. Nearly all modern themes and website builders are responsive out of the box; problems usually creep in through custom additions, oversized images, or old plugins.

• Set a legible base font size (around 16px) so text never needs zooming.
• Make buttons and tap targets large with clear spacing around them.
• Compress and correctly size images so pages load fast on mobile data.
• Make your phone number a tap-to-call link and your address a tap-to-map link.
• Remove or shrink intrusive pop-ups on mobile, and make sure the close button is easy to hit.
• Keep menus simple — a clear tappable menu icon beats a crowded row of tiny links.

Checking every page on every screen size by hand is tedious, and it's easy to miss things because your own phone caches the site and you already know where to tap. An AI website audit tests your site the way a first-time mobile visitor experiences it and flags the specific failures — text too small, tap targets too close, images slowing you down, layout overflowing the screen.

The free AISiteFix scan gives you the headline issues in plain English, and the Premium Report lists them page by page with what to change. If you'd like to see the format first, see a sample report.