Is your website mobile friendly? How to check and fix it

Check it in two minutes

Open your website on your own phone, the way a customer would: search for your business name and tap the result. Then ask yourself four things. Does the page fill the screen, or do you have to pinch to zoom? Can you read the text without zooming? Do you have to scroll sideways to see everything? Can you tap your buttons and your phone number without hitting the wrong thing?

If you answered yes to zooming or sideways scrolling, your site is not built for phones. You can also test from a computer: in Chrome, Edge or Firefox, press F12 and look for the small phone-and-tablet icon (“device toolbar”). It shows your page at phone size. For a quick grade with no setup, our free website report card checks the same basics and tells you what to fix.

The one line that makes a page fit a phone

Every page has a short instruction, called the viewport meta tag, that tells a phone how wide to draw it. It looks like this:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Without it, a phone pretends the screen is a desktop monitor and shrinks the whole page to fit, which is why old sites look tiny. You don’t need to understand the code. You only need to know that whoever built your site should be able to confirm that line is there.

Fluid layout, not a fixed width

A phone-friendly site is fluid: columns stack on top of each other on a narrow screen and sit side by side on a wide one. An old-style site has a fixed width, say 960 pixels, so a phone can only shrink it or let you scroll sideways. If your site was built many years ago, it is probably fixed.

What to look for on a phone

• Readable text. You should be able to read paragraphs at arm’s length without zooming. If you squint, the text is too small.
• Buttons you can hit. Links and buttons need to be large enough for a thumb and spaced apart, so tapping “Book” doesn’t open “Menu” by accident. These are called tap targets.
• A phone number you can tap. A phone number should be a tel: link, so one tap starts the call. Plain text forces people to memorize it or copy it. It is one of the quickest fixes and one of the most useful.
• Forms with the right keyboard. An email field should bring up the keyboard with the @ sign, and a phone field should bring up the number pad. Short forms get filled in; long ones get abandoned.
• Images that aren’t huge. A photo straight from a camera can be many times larger than a phone screen needs. Oversized images slow the page down for everyone.

Speed on a mobile connection

Your customers are not always on fast Wi-Fi. They are in a parking lot, on a ferry, or on a rural road with one bar. A page that feels instant in your office can crawl there. The usual causes are oversized images, too many add-ons and heavy animations. Fewer, smaller things load faster.

Why Google cares

Google looks at the mobile version of your pages first when it decides how to list them. This is called mobile-first indexing. If your phone version is cramped, slow or missing content, that is the version Google judges. A site that works well on a phone is also easier for people to find.

Your options if it fails

1. Ask whoever built it. Send them this page and ask whether the viewport line is present and whether there is a phone-friendly update. Some sites can be fixed in an afternoon.
2. Change the template or theme. If your site runs on a common website builder, a newer template is often built for phones already. Check that your text and photos survive the move.
3. Rebuild it. If the site is very old, patching can cost nearly as much as starting fresh, and a rebuild gets you a clean base.

DeMark, built in New Brunswick and serving businesses across Canada, builds every site phone-friendly by default, with tappable phone numbers, readable text and bookings that work on a small screen. You can see what yours could look like with a free website draft, no card needed, before you decide anything.

Start with the two-minute phone check today. If the page passes, you’re in good shape. If it doesn’t, you now know exactly what to ask for.