Originally published March 2019 · Updated October 2026 · By SM Web Development
For a lot of small businesses, most of the people who find them are on a phone. Think of someone whose furnace quit on a cold night: they’re searching from the basement stairs, not sitting at a desk. Your own website analytics will tell you the real share for your site. Either way, a website that’s awkward on a phone loses people before they ever get in touch.
The good news is that checking takes about 10 minutes and no technical knowledge.
1. Start with the phone in your pocket
Open your website on your own phone and try to do what a customer would:
- Read the home page without zooming in. If you have to pinch, the text is too small.
- Tap your phone number. It should start a call.
- Find your opening hours, address or the areas you serve. Count how many taps it takes.
- Open and close the menu.
- Fill in your contact or quote request form. Are the boxes easy to tap? Does the keyboard cover the button? Does the message actually arrive?
- Attach a photo, if your form takes one. A homeowner sending a picture of a leaking water heater will do it straight from their phone’s camera, so make sure that works.
2. Borrow a different phone
Your phone isn’t everyone’s phone. Ask someone with a different make, or an older or smaller screen, to try the same things. An iPhone and an Android phone can show the same page quite differently.
3. Use the device view built into your browser
On a computer, every major browser can show your site at phone and tablet sizes:
- Chrome: right-click anywhere on the page, choose Inspect, then click the icon that looks like a phone and a tablet. Pick a device from the list at the top.
- Safari: turn on the developer features first (Safari → Settings → Advanced, then tick the option to show features for web developers). Then choose Develop → Enter Responsive Design Mode.
- Firefox: choose Tools → Browser Tools → Responsive Design Mode, or press Ctrl+Shift+M (Cmd+Option+M on a Mac).
These views are close to the real thing but not perfect, which is why steps 1 and 2 come first.
What to look for
- Text you have to zoom to read
- Buttons or links so close together you tap the wrong one
- Having to scroll sideways
- Images cut off or stretched
- Pop-ups that cover the page and are hard to close on a small screen
- A phone number that’s buried, or shown as an image you can’t tap
- A contact form that’s hard to fill in, or that doesn’t send
If you find a problem
Some fixes are small, like a font size or a button that needs more space. Others mean the site wasn’t built to work on phones, and that’s a bigger job. Either way, it helps to know which one you have before you spend anything.
A phone check is how our free website review starts. We’ll look at your site on a phone, the way your customers do, and tell you the three things we’d fix first.
If you run a trade and the answer is a rebuild, Trades Launch is our fixed-price website for trades, built around tap-to-call and a quote form that takes photos.