You know that moment when you tap on a business in Google, the site opens on your phone, and it’s clearly not a mobile friendly website? The text is so small you have to squint. You try to zoom in and the whole page slides sideways. The menu button does nothing, or it opens and covers everything. You finally find the phone number, tap it, and nothing happens because it’s just a picture of a phone number.
So what do you do? If you’re like most people, you hit the back button and call the next business on the list. No hard feelings. You just needed a plumber (or a haircut, or a lawyer), and that site made it harder than it had to be.
Here’s the part that stings a little. The same thing could be happening on your website right now, and you’d never know – even if you had optimized your website for mobile in the past. Nobody calls to tell you they gave up on your site. They just leave.
Brutal, right? To help you solve this potential issue on your own website, let’s take a look at what makes a site work on mobile, why Google cares so much and how to tell if yours needs some help.
What Is a Mobile Friendly Website?
In plain English, a mobile friendly website is one that changes shape to fit the screen it’s on. On your laptop, you might see a few columns sitting side by side. On your phone, those same pieces stack neatly on top of each other, so you can scroll down with your thumb and read everything without zooming in.
It’s worth pointing out that “it loads on my phone” isn’t the same thing. Pretty much every website will open on a phone. The real test is whether someone can read it, find what they came for and get in touch with you without getting annoyed.
What Is the Difference Between Mobile-First and Responsive Design?
You’ll probably hear both terms, and they sound like the same thing. They’re related, but they mean different things.
Responsive design describes how a site behaves. The layout stretches, shrinks and rearranges itself to fit the screen, so the website works on a phone, a tablet and a big desktop monitor.
Mobile-first design describes where the planning of the website starts. The designer lays out the phone version first, deciding what belongs on a small screen, and then adds more as the screen gets bigger. A responsive site can be planned either way, starting from the phone’s layout or starting from the desktop’s layout.
So which one should you look for? Your customers won’t know or care how your site was planned. They’ll only notice if it’s easy to use on their phone. A desktop-first site that’s been properly tested and adjusted for mobile can work just as well as one designed with a mobile first approach. The end result is what counts.
One more thing that trips people up. “Mobile-first design” and Google’s “mobile-first indexing” (more on that below) may sound alike, but they aren’t connected. One is about how a site is planned. The other is about how Google reads it. Keep in mind that Google is a computer and humans view things differently than a computer does.
How Many People Browse Websites on Their Phones?
More than you might think. About half of all web traffic worldwide now comes from phones, and in Canada it’s over 40%. We commonly see even 80% or more of website traffic reported in Google Analytics of our client’s websites being reported as mobile traffic. If you have Google Analytics set up on your site, it will show you exactly how many of your visitors are on a phone versus a desktop or tablet device. And, if you don’t have Google Analytics set up on your website yet, just ask us. We’re happy to show you how to connect it.
Think about the last time you looked something up online. Were you at your desk? Or were you in a parking lot, on the couch, or standing in front of a leaky tap wondering who to call? Your customers are no different. If most of your website visitors are viewing your website on a phone, the phone version of your site is the one that counts. The desktop version is more like the backup. But, it is smart to optimize both so that no matter the device you know the user experience is great.
Why Does Page Speed Count More on a Mobile Device?
Be honest. How long do you wait for a page to load before you give up? Three seconds? Most people won’t wait much longer than that, especially on their phone.
Google keeps an eye on this too, using a set of measurements called Core Web Vitals. In simple terms, they check how quickly the main part of your page shows up and whether things jump around while it loads. You know when you go to tap a button, an image pops in, and suddenly you’ve tapped something else? Google notices that experience, and it doesn’t score well.
Good mobile website design keeps pages light and quick. That usually means shrinking image file sizes, trimming extra code and skipping the big autoplay video at the top that phones struggle with.
Does Google Rank Mobile Websites Differently?
It does, and more than most people realize. Google uses mobile-first indexing which means Google looks at the mobile version of your site when it decides where you show up in search results. Not the desktop one.
If your site looks great on your office computer but falls apart on a phone, Google is judging you on the version that falls apart. That can pull your rankings down on every device. We see this a lot. A business owner checks their site at their desk, feels good about it and has no idea what’s going on with the mobile version. Go ahead and take a second to look at your website now on your mobile phone. Does it give you a great experience?
Does AI Search Prefer Mobile Friendly Websites Too?
A lot of people now get their answers from AI before they click on anything. They read the AI Overview at the top of Google, or they ask ChatGPT to recommend a good roofer in town. So it’s fair to wonder if your website has any say in those answers.
Google’s AI Overviews draw from the same pages Google already has in its search index, and Google says the usual advice still applies, including giving visitors a good experience on page. Since Google looks at the mobile version of your site first, a weak mobile site can keep you out of those AI answers as well as the regular results.
Tools like ChatGPT work a little differently. They send out their own crawlers to read websites, and most of those crawlers can’t load content that depends on heavy scripts to appear. If your services or contact details only show up after a fancy slider or pop-out menu loads, an AI tool may never see them. The simple, lightweight setup that works well on a phone is also easier for AI tools to read, which gives you a better shot at being the business they mention.
How Does a Mobile Friendly Site Help Local Businesses Get Found?
When someone searches “electrician near me” or “accountant in Barrie” on their phone, Google usually shows a map with a handful of local businesses right at the top. That map is where a lot of new customer calls come from.
Getting onto the local business map depends on a few things, like your Google Business Profile and your reviews, but your website plays a part too. A website that is quick to load, is well-organized in terms of content with your location and services spelled out clearly gives Google good reason to show your business to people nearby. And once someone taps through from that map, a site that loads fast with your phone number front and centre makes it much easier for that person to call you instead of scrolling on to a competitor.
What Makes a Website Easy to Use on a Phone?
A mobile first website design is built around how people hold their phones. Most of us scroll and tap with one thumb, usually while doing something else. When we build or review a mobile layout, here’s what we intentionally design around:
- A phone number at the top of the page that calls you with one tap
- Buttons big enough for a fingertip, with enough space between them that people don’t hit the wrong one
- Short contact forms that bring up the right keyboard (like a number pad for the phone number field) and function properly
- A menu that opens cleanly and doesn’t hide your main pages three levels deep
- Text you can read at arm’s length without zooming
Grab your phone and try your own site like you’re a customer seeing it for the first time. Can you read the website easily? Do your forms work and does the site load quickly? If any of these takes more than a few seconds, your visitors are struggling too.
If The Mobile Experience Of A Website Is Improved, Will It Bring In More Customers?
We’ve seen it happen over and over again. A clunky mobile site is more than an annoyance. It makes a business look behind the times, and fair or not, visitors tend to assume a messy website means messy work. A clean, quick site earns trust before anyone reads a word about what you do.
It also makes getting in touch with you easier. When the call button is right there, the form takes thirty seconds and pages load right away, more of the people who find you end up reaching out. A lot of the time, the biggest win is getting more out of the visitors you already have instead of chasing new ones.
Need Help Making Your Website Mobile Friendly?
Every website we design at 3SIXTY Marketing Solutions is mobile responsive as our standard, so it’s part of the build from day one. Before launch, we run speed tests, check for errors and set up the SEO, AEO, and GEO settings, like image alt tags and a sitemap just to name a few, so search engines and AI tools can make sense of your site and rank your business as high as possible, right out the gate. Then we test it on both desktop and mobile to be sure that it’s running perfectly on both so your business always presents an optimal user experience, no matter which device the website is viewed on.
Not sure how your site stacks up? We’re happy to have a look and give you our professional opinion. Book a free consultation with us today, and we’ll tell you what’s working, what isn’t and what it would take to fix it.
