Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly? Here's How to Check

Here is a question every UK business owner should ask themselves: when was the last time you actually tried using your own website on your phone? Not glanced at it briefly, but properly tried to navigate it, read the text, tap a button, and fill in a form?

If the answer is “never” or “ages ago”, you might have a problem. A mobile-friendly website is no longer a nice-to-have. It is the bare minimum. More than 60% of all web traffic in the UK now comes from mobile devices, and Google actively penalises websites that do not work properly on phones. If your site is not mobile-friendly, you are losing customers and Google is pushing you down the search results.

This guide will show you how to check if your website works on mobile, what the most common problems are, and how to fix them, whether you use WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or something custom-built. No jargon, no waffle, just practical steps you can follow today.

Why Mobile Matters More Than You Think

Let us start with the numbers, because they are hard to ignore. In the UK, over 60% of all website visits now come from mobile devices. That figure is even higher for local businesses. When someone searches for “plumber near me” or “best Italian restaurant in Manchester”, they are almost certainly doing it from a phone. They are out and about, they need something, and they are looking for a business that can help them right now.

If your website is difficult to use on a phone (tiny text, impossible navigation, images spilling off the screen), that customer is not going to struggle through it. They will hit the back button and choose one of your competitors instead. It takes about three seconds. You will never know they visited, and you will never know you lost them.

But it is not just about customers. Google cares about mobile too, and it has made that very clear.

What Is Mobile-First Indexing?

Since 2019, Google has used something called mobile-first indexing. In plain English, this means that when Google looks at your website to decide where to rank it in search results, it looks at the mobile version of your site, not the desktop version. If your desktop site is beautiful and full of useful content, but your mobile version is broken or missing information, Google will judge you on the broken mobile version.

Think about that for a moment. Even if most of your customers happen to find you on a desktop computer, Google is still ranking you based on how your site performs on a phone. There is no way around this. If your site does not work on mobile, your SEO suffers across the board.

How to Check If Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

There are three ways to check, ranging from dead simple to properly thorough. We recommend doing all three, because each one catches different problems.

1. Open Your Site on Your Phone

This is the most obvious and most important test. Pick up your phone, open your browser, and type in your website address. Now try to use it like a customer would. Ask yourself these questions:

• Can you read the text without zooming in? If you have to pinch and zoom to read anything, the text is too small.
• Can you tap the navigation menu and get to different pages easily? If the menu items are tiny or overlap each other, your navigation is broken on mobile.
• Can you tap buttons without accidentally hitting the wrong one? If buttons and links are crammed together, your visitors will misclick constantly.
• Does the page scroll vertically only, or do you also have to scroll sideways? Horizontal scrolling on a mobile site is a dead giveaway that something is wrong.
• Can you fill in a contact form? If the form fields are too small to tap, or the keyboard covers the form and you cannot see what you are typing, you have a problem.
• Does a pop-up immediately cover the screen? If a visitor has to hunt for a tiny close button within the first few seconds, many will just leave.

Try this on at least two different pages, starting with your homepage and your contact page at minimum. Better yet, ask a friend or family member to try it on their phone and tell you honestly what they think. You are too close to your own website to see its problems objectively.

2. Use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test

Google offers a free tool that analyses any web page and tells you whether it meets their mobile-friendliness standards. Go to Google's Mobile-Friendly Test (or search “Google mobile-friendly test” and click the first result), paste in your website address, and hit “Test URL”.

After a few seconds, Google will tell you one of two things: either your page is mobile-friendly, or it has issues. If there are issues, Google will list them, such as text too small to read, clickable elements too close together, or content wider than the screen. This gives you a specific list of what needs fixing.

One thing to note: this tool tests one page at a time. Your homepage might pass but an older blog post or your contact page might not. Test your most important pages individually: the homepage, your services page, your contact page, and any page you link to in adverts or social media.

3. Run a Free BeSpottd Scan

The BeSpottd scanner checks your website for over 50 common issues, including mobile-friendliness, in about two minutes. Unlike Google's tool, which only tests one page, the BeSpottd scan looks at your overall site and flags problems you might miss if you are only checking individual pages.

It also checks for related issues that affect mobile experience, such as slow loading times, missing SSL certificates, and broken links. You get a simple report you can act on, written in plain English rather than developer-speak.

Common Mobile Problems (and What They Look Like)

If your website is not mobile-friendly, the problem is almost certainly one (or more) of the following. These are the issues we see most often when scanning UK small business websites.

Text too small to read
This is the most common problem by far. The text on your site might look perfectly readable on a desktop monitor, but on a phone screen it shrinks down to something you need a magnifying glass for. If visitors have to pinch and zoom to read your opening hours, your phone number, or what services you offer, they will not bother. The minimum readable font size on mobile is generally considered to be 16 pixels. Anything smaller and you are asking your visitors to squint.

Buttons and links too close together
On a desktop, you click with a precise mouse cursor. On a phone, you tap with a finger, and fingers are far less precise than mouse cursors. If your buttons, links, or menu items are too close together, visitors will constantly tap the wrong thing. Google specifically flags this as a mobile usability problem. Tap targets should be at least 48 pixels tall and wide, with enough space between them so a thumb does not hit two things at once.

Horizontal scrolling
A mobile-friendly page should only scroll vertically, up and down. If your visitors also have to scroll sideways to see the full content, something on your page is wider than the phone screen. This is usually caused by images, tables, or embedded elements (like maps or videos) that have a fixed width instead of a flexible one. It makes the entire page feel broken, even if the rest of the content is fine.

Images overflowing or not loading properly
Large images that were uploaded at their original size (say, 4000 pixels wide from a camera or stock photo site) will either overflow off the edge of a mobile screen or take so long to load that visitors give up waiting. Images on a mobile-friendly site should resize automatically to fit the screen width, and they should be optimised (compressed) so they do not slow the page down.

Pop-ups that block the screen
Those full-screen pop-ups asking visitors to subscribe to a newsletter or accept cookies? On desktop, they are annoying. On mobile, they can be crippling. If the close button is tiny or hidden off-screen, your visitor literally cannot get past the pop-up to see your website. Google has specifically said that intrusive interstitials (that is their term for these full-screen pop-ups on mobile) can hurt your search ranking.

Forms that are impossible to fill in
Contact forms, booking forms, and enquiry forms are critical for many businesses, and they are how customers get in touch. On mobile, a poorly designed form is a disaster. Input fields that are too narrow, dropdown menus that do not work on touchscreens, and submit buttons hidden below the fold. All of these stop customers from completing the one action you most want them to take. If your contact form does not work properly on a phone, you are losing enquiries every single day.

How to Fix a Website That Isn't Mobile-Friendly

The fix depends on how your website was built. Here is what to do for the three most common scenarios.

WordPress

If your website runs on WordPress (and roughly a third of all websites in the world do), the most likely cause of mobile problems is your theme. A theme controls how your website looks and behaves, including how it adapts to different screen sizes.

If your theme is old or was not built with responsive design in mind, it simply will not rearrange the layout for smaller screens. The fix is to switch to a modern, mobile-responsive theme. There are thousands of free and paid responsive themes available in the WordPress theme directory. Popular options like Astra, GeneratePress, and Kadence are all designed to work beautifully on mobile out of the box.

Before switching themes, back up your website first. Changing themes can affect your site's appearance and sometimes its functionality. If you are not comfortable doing this yourself, a WordPress developer can handle it for you. It is usually a straightforward job that should not cost a fortune.

If your theme is already responsive but you are still seeing problems, the issue is likely with specific content. Check for oversized images (use your media library to see image dimensions and replace anything over 2000 pixels wide), tables that are too wide for mobile screens, and any custom CSS or page builders that might be overriding the responsive layout.

Wix and Squarespace

Both Wix and Squarespace create mobile-responsive websites by default, which is one of the reasons they are popular with small business owners. If you built your site on either platform in the last few years, it should already be mobile-friendly, but that does not mean it is perfect.

Wix has a dedicated mobile editor that lets you see and adjust how your site looks on phones. In the Wix editor, click the mobile phone icon in the top toolbar to switch to mobile view. From there, you can move elements around, resize text, and hide things that do not work well on small screens. Changes you make in the mobile editor only affect the mobile version and will not change your desktop layout.

Squarespace handles mobile layout automatically based on the template you chose. You have less direct control over the mobile layout than with Wix, but Squarespace's templates are generally well-designed for mobile. If something looks off, try switching to a different template (Squarespace lets you preview templates before applying them), or check whether custom code or third-party integrations are causing layout issues.

On both platforms, the most common cause of mobile problems is content that the owner added after the initial build, such as wide images, embedded spreadsheets, long tables, or custom code blocks. Review your pages on your phone and fix anything that looks broken. Usually it is a single element causing the issue, not the entire site.

Custom-Built Websites

If your website was built by a developer (or a web design agency) using custom code, the fix is more technical. The underlying code needs to use responsive CSS, specifically CSS media queries that adjust the layout based on the visitor's screen width.

The key things a developer needs to ensure are:

• A viewport meta tag in the HTML head. Without this, mobile browsers will render the page as if it were a desktop screen and then shrink everything down. This single line of code is the most important technical requirement for mobile-friendliness.
• Flexible layouts that use percentages or CSS Grid / Flexbox instead of fixed pixel widths. A container set to 960 pixels wide will overflow on any phone screen. A container set to 100% width will adapt automatically.
• Images with max-width: 100% so they scale down to fit the screen instead of overflowing.
• Touch-friendly tap targets. Buttons and links need to be at least 48 pixels in height and width, with adequate spacing between them.
• Readable font sizes. A base font size of at least 16 pixels on mobile, with line heights that make paragraphs easy to scan.

If your website was built more than five or six years ago and was never updated for mobile, it may be more practical to rebuild it on a modern platform than to try to retrofit responsive design onto an old codebase. That is an honest assessment, not a sales pitch. Retrofitting an old site is often more expensive and more frustrating than starting fresh with a responsive foundation.

The Pinch-and-Zoom Test

We mentioned this earlier, but it deserves its own section because it is the single simplest way to know if your site has a mobile problem.

Pick up your phone. Go to your website. Now ask yourself one question: do I need to pinch and zoom to read or use anything on this page?

If the answer is yes, even once on any page, your website is not properly mobile-friendly. A truly responsive website adjusts its layout so that text is readable, buttons are tappable, and content fits the screen width without any zooming required. That is the whole point of responsive design.

The pinch-and-zoom test is not a technical audit. It will not catch every subtle issue. But it catches the big one: is this website actually usable on a phone without extra effort? If it fails that basic test, everything else (your SEO, your conversion rate, your customer experience) is being dragged down with it.

Run this test on your homepage, your services or products page, your contact page, and any page you link to from social media or Google Ads. These are the pages your customers land on most often, and they are the ones that matter most.

What to Do Next

If your website is already mobile-friendly, well done. You are ahead of a lot of your competitors. Keep it that way by checking on a real phone every time you make significant changes. New images, new pages, new plugins or integrations can all break a mobile layout that was previously fine.

If your website is not mobile-friendly, fixing it should be a priority. Not next month, not when you get round to it. Now. Every day your site is difficult to use on a phone, you are losing potential customers who will never come back. With over 60% of your traffic likely coming from mobile devices, a broken mobile experience means a broken business website.

Start with the simplest fix available to you. If you are on WordPress, switch to a responsive theme. If you are on Wix, open the mobile editor and fix the obvious issues. If you have a custom-built site, talk to a developer about adding responsive CSS. And if your site is truly beyond saving on mobile, it might be time for a rebuild. It is almost certainly cheaper than the customers you are losing.

Mobile-friendliness is just one piece of the puzzle. A great mobile experience also means a fast-loading website, a secure connection, and clear content that helps visitors find what they need. Here are guides that cover the next steps:

• Why your website is slow and how to fix it: speed and mobile go hand in hand, and a slow mobile site is almost as bad as a broken one.
• What is SEO?: understand how Google finds and ranks your business, and where mobile fits into the bigger picture.
• What is SSL?: the padlock icon in your browser matters more than you think, especially on mobile where trust signals are smaller.
• Page titles and meta descriptions: what your customers see before they even click through to your site.

Not sure where your website stands? Our free website scan checks mobile-friendliness alongside 50+ other factors in about two minutes. It is the fastest way to find out what is working and what needs attention.