My website doesn't work on phones: what that costs

It is rarely a blank page. The common failure is a desktop page shrunk to fit a phone screen: the whole layout is there, at a quarter of the size, and you pinch to read anything. The menu needs a magnifier. The phone number is a link you can’t hit with a thumb. The enquiry form runs off the right edge, so the Send button is somewhere past the screen.

The other version is the site that technically fits but takes fifteen seconds to appear, because it sends a phone the same six megabytes of images it sends a desktop. On prepaid data that is not slow. That is expensive, and people close it.

The buyer who matters most is the one in the car park, or on site, or on the couch at nine at night, checking whether you look like a real business before they phone. They have your name from a referral or a search. They open the site, it doesn’t fit, and they open the next name on the list instead. You never hear about it, which is why owners underestimate this one. There is no bounce report for a phone call that didn’t come.

Since 2023 Google indexes the mobile version of every site and uses that to decide where you rank, even for people searching on a computer. A site with a broken phone layout is scored on the broken layout. So the desktop site you are proud of is not the one Google is looking at, and it cannot rescue your rankings.

This is the reason a phone problem often shows up first as a search problem. Enquiries drift down over a year, nobody connects it to the site, and the site gets blamed for being “old” when the specific fault is that it fails Google’s mobile test.

If you have paid for Google or Facebook advertising, most of those clicks came from phones, because that is where people see adverts. Each click paid for a visitor who arrived at the shrunk page. We have audited accounts where the business spent more on clicks in a year than a phone-first rebuild would have cost, and the clicks produced nothing because of where they landed.

This one is specific to South Africa and most overseas advice ignores it. A large share of your visitors are on prepaid bundles. A homepage that weighs five megabytes costs them real money to open, and they can feel it. A well-built page weighs under one megabyte on a phone, including the pictures, because the images are resized for the screen that asks for them.

• Open your site on your own phone. Not the app, the browser. Can you read the menu without zooming? Can you tap the phone number with a thumb? Can you fill in the enquiry form and see the Send button?
• Run Google’s phone test. Search for PageSpeed Insights, paste your address, and read the Mobile tab. Two lines matter: the time until the biggest thing on the page appears (under 2.5 seconds is the target) and any warning about the viewport or tap targets. Those two warnings mean the layout was never drawn for a phone.
• Search your own business name on your phone. Look at how the result renders. If Google shows the desktop title cut off, or no description, it is reading the same broken version.

Sometimes, and it is worth asking before you spend anything. If the site is WordPress on a theme from the last five years, the phone layout may exist and simply be switched off or broken by one plugin. An hour of a developer’s time settles that. If the theme is older, the honest answer is no. A layout drawn for a wide screen has to be redrawn for a narrow one, and redrawing the layout is most of a redesign. Anyone who promises to “make it responsive” with a plugin on a 2015 theme is selling you the shrunk page with a slogan.

We draw the phone layout first and the desktop layout second, because the phone is where the customer is. Every image is sent at the size the screen asked for. And we measure it: the target in the proposal is Google’s own number, under 2.5 seconds on a mid-range Android on a 4G connection, and we test it at launch rather than assume it. Our own site scores 96 out of 100 on that test, and the client sites are built the same way.

If you want to know where your site stands, send us the address. We will reply with the phone checks done and a straight answer on whether it is an afternoon’s repair or a rebuild, whether or not you hire us.