Is my website mobile friendly?

Google's test is gone

Google retired its Mobile-Friendly Test, and the matching report in Search Console, on December 1, 2023. But Google still uses the phone version of your site to decide what to show in search (it calls this "mobile-first indexing"). So the phone version matters as much as ever; you check it by eye instead.

Check it in 10 minutes

Look at your home page and your busiest page (often contact or events) at a phone's size. For each, a mobile-friendly page passes all of these:

1. No sideways scrolling. Everything fits the width of the screen. A wide table, a calendar or an embedded map is the usual culprit.
2. Words you can read without zooming. If you'd reach for your glasses or pinch to read the main text, it's too small.
3. You can still zoom in. Pinch the page on a phone: it should get bigger. Some sites turn zoom off, which locks out people with weaker eyesight. Accessibility Check flags this as "Zoom turned off".
4. Buttons and links you can tap. Big enough to hit with a thumb, and not crammed so close together that you tap the wrong one.
5. A menu that works. It opens, every item can be reached, and it closes again.
6. Nothing covering the page. No pop-up that hides the content as soon as the page opens. A cookie notice or an age check is fine.
7. A phone number that rings. Tap it: your phone should offer to call. Link Check finds phone links that won't dial.
8. Forms you can fill in. The boxes fit the screen, you can see what each one is for, and the Send button is reachable.
9. Pictures that fit and load quickly. Phones are often on slower connections; Picture Check finds heavy pictures.
10. Turn it sideways. The page should work both ways up.

Ways to look

• Screen sizes: your page at a phone's, a tablet's and a laptop's width side by side, with six common sizes, Rotate, and a 200% zoom view.
• Your own phone: the real thing, and the best test of the menu, forms and tapping. Try a friend's phone too, if it's a different kind.
• Your browser's phone view: See your site on a phone, from your computer shows how, in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari.

Common causes, and who fixes them

• The whole page is shrunk to tiny print: the page is missing the line that tells phones to fit it to the screen (your web person will know it as the "viewport" tag), or the template is too old to rearrange itself. Your web person or a newer template fixes it.
• One wide thing sticks out: a table, a calendar, a map or a picture set to a fixed width. Usually a fix in that one block.
• It looks fine on a computer but wrong on a phone, on a website builder: builders keep separate phone settings. See Squarespace or Wix mobile view looks bad?
• Text too small or buttons too close: the template's sizes. Ask your web person to make the main text and buttons bigger on phones.

Fitting a narrow screen also helps people who zoom in on a computer: at 200% zoom, a laptop gives your page about half its width. The accessibility rules (WCAG) ask that pages work at 400% zoom without scrolling sideways, and that tap targets are at least 24 by 24 pixels or spaced well apart.

What Screen sizes can and can't show

• It's your own browser drawn at each width, which catches most layout problems. A real iPhone can differ in small ways, so check on a phone before you call it done.
• Some websites ask browsers not to show them inside another site, a sensible security setting. If yours does, we say so and point you to your browser's phone view.
• It doesn't give you a score. You look, and you judge, with the list above.