Your website on a phone: what really matters
Most of your customers meet your business on a small screen, so here is the phone test you can run on your own site tonight.
Six in the evening, supermarket car park, rain coming down. Someone's boiler has started making a noise, and they've just typed your trade and your town into their phone. Whatever happens next happens on a screen the size of their palm, one-handed, with a trolley to push. That is the version of your website that decides whether they ring you.
Which turns the usual order of things upside down. The desktop layout — the wide hero photo, the three columns, the menu with eight items — is not the version most people see. The phone version isn't a shrunken afterthought. It's the product.
What has to be visible before anyone scrolls
Open your own site on your own phone. Not the tablet, not the office monitor. Look only at what fits on the screen, no scrolling, and ask whether a stranger could tell what you do and roughly where you are.
Often they can't. The screen is filled edge to edge with a photograph, there's a line underneath about passion and quality, and the actual trade turns up two scrolls down. Nobody notices on a desktop, because everything lands on screen at once. On a phone the visitor gets the photo, the slogan, and a good reason to go back to the search results.
Three things belong up there as text, not baked into an image: what you do, where you work, how to reach you. "Halliday Physio — sports injuries and back pain, five minutes from the station." Nobody is going to call that a beautiful headline. It does answer the question that made someone search. Our piece on website copy that actually convinces people goes deeper into the wording.
Big enough for a thumb
A mouse pointer lands on a single pixel. A thumb lands on an area about the size of a fingertip, often while its owner is walking. Anything meant to be tapped has to be sized for that, with room around it. The usual traps:
- Text you have to pinch to zoom. If reading you requires two fingers and a bit of effort, most people won't bother.
- Buttons sitting flush against each other. "Call" pressed up against "Directions" means the thumb picks the wrong one. Give them room.
- A menu hiding the only two things anyone wants. Twelve items collapse into a list nobody reads. Your number and your hours shouldn't be in there at all.
- A number that isn't a link. If it's plain text, someone has to memorise it, switch apps and type it in. Plenty won't.
Your number, your address and your opening hours want to be reachable without a detour — near the top, and again right at the bottom, where thumbs end up anyway. Hours and contact details that win customers covers how to lay that out.
Can you read it in sunlight?
Light grey text on a white background looks refined on a monitor in a dim office. Outside, on a phone, held at an angle, it more or less disappears. Same goes for thin display fonts and any text sitting on top of a busy photo. Take your phone outdoors and read your own homepage. If you catch yourself squinting or cupping a hand over the screen, that's your answer — and it's the cheapest thing on this list to fix, because it's a darker colour and a bigger size.
The weight you can't see
When a site drags on a phone, it's usually the photographs. A picture straight off a camera is built so you could print it at poster size. Upload it untouched and every visitor downloads the whole thing to view it on a strip of glass. On office wifi you'd never know. Your customers are on mobile data, sometimes on one bar at the edge of town.
So shrink pictures before they go up, and cut whatever isn't earning its place — the handshake stock photo, the slider of five images, the embedded video nobody plays. Why a fast website wins you more customers and good website photos without a photographer both go further.
Most people won't fill in the form anyway
Worth knowing before you spend an evening perfecting it: a lot of customers never touch a contact form. They ring. A large, obvious, tappable number will often do more work for you than the best form you could build.
Keep the form by all means — just stop making it a chore. Everything you need in order to call someone back is a name, one way to reach them, and a line about the job. Title, company, postcode, "how did you hear about us?" — all of that you can ask on the call itself.
Ten minutes, your own phone
- Turn wifi off and load the site on mobile data. Time it.
- Tap the number. Does a call start?
- Tap the address. Does a map open?
- Read only what sits above the fold. Does it say what you do and where?
- Fill in your own form, thumb only, all the way to the end.
Write down every snag. It's usually two or three things, and they're usually small ones.
If the whole thing fights you — if every fix runs aground on the way the site was built years ago — then rebuilding rather than patching is a fair conclusion to reach. Just don't start there. Start with a tappable number and one honest sentence at the top. Our guide to what a small business website actually needs is the sensible next read.
