Try this before you read any further. Pick up your phone, open your website, and try to book yourself an appointment using only one thumb, the way a client would on the bus or in a queue. Was it easy, or did you pinch, zoom and squint? If the page loads and nothing looks broken, it's tempting to assume you have a mobile friendly website. But a site that loads on a phone and a site that works well for a thumb are two different things. It matters more than most people think, because more than half of the world's web traffic comes from phones, and Google now looks at the mobile version of your site first when it decides where to show you in search.
Working on a phone is not the same as working well
Most of what goes wrong on mobile comes down to three small things. The first is text. Body text that looks fine on a laptop can turn into something you have to zoom into on a phone, and people rarely bother to zoom. They just leave. A base size of around 16 pixels for your main text is the usual recommendation, and it's worth checking that your menu and buttons aren't set much smaller than that.
The second is buttons and links. A fingertip is a lot bigger than a mouse pointer, so tap targets should be roughly 48 pixels with some space around them. When your booking button is tiny, or two links sit right next to each other, people tap the wrong thing, get frustrated, and you lose the booking at the very last step.
The third is easy to miss: content that exists on your laptop version but disappears on the phone. Google uses the mobile version of your page for indexing and ranking, so if your prices, opening hours or service descriptions are hidden or shortened on mobile, that's the version that counts. The same information should be there on both, even if it's laid out differently.
A five-minute check you can do today
You don't need any special skills for this. Start with this: take your phone, hold it in one hand, and try to do the thing your clients most need to do, whether that's booking, sending a message or finding your address. Notice every place where you hesitate, because each one is a place where a client might give up. Next, read a paragraph without zooming, and tap a few links to see whether you hit the right ones the first time. Then open your site on your laptop and on your phone, one after the other, and look for anything that's missing on the small screen.
What to do if your site doesn't pass
Don't panic, and don't assume you need a whole new website. In most cases it comes down to a handful of changes: larger buttons, bigger text, a shorter menu, and images that aren't bigger than they need to be. If you built your site yourself with a website builder, many of these are settings you can change in an afternoon. If someone else built it, you now know exactly what to ask for, which makes the conversation a lot easier. Either way, it's better to find out now than to hear it from a client who gave up halfway through booking. And if you'd like a second pair of eyes on your site, write to me and we can go through it together.
(*cover image is from Pexels)
