Your website should not need a magnifying glass

Mobile layout problems are easy to miss on a desktop and very easy for customers to hate. Here’s how to tell if your site is one of them.

4 min read · Plain-English series

You built your website on a big monitor, in a comfy chair, with both hands free. Your customer is looking at it one-handed, on a phone, on a moving bus, in the sun. Those are not the same experience — and only one of them is buying anything.

A person squinting at a phone, zooming in to read a website that's too small. — If they have to pinch and zoom, you’ve already lost them.

The blind spot: you’re not on a phone, but they are

Here’s the quiet problem. You check your own website the way you built it — on a laptop, where everything looks lovely. But most of the people who actually matter are on a phone, and they’re seeing a completely different version. If you never look at it the way they do, you never see what they’re putting up with.

And “putting up with” is usually the right phrase. People don’t email you to say your site is fiddly on mobile. They just leave, quietly, and go to the competitor whose site didn’t fight them.

Signs your site isn’t mobile-friendly

You don’t need a tool to spot most of these — just your own phone and thirty honest seconds:

Text you have to zoom in to read. If you’re pinching the screen to make words legible, so is everyone else.
Buttons too small or too close together. Fingers aren’t mouse pointers. Tap targets that are fine with a cursor become a game of chance with a thumb.
Sideways scrolling. If the page drifts left and right, something’s spilling off the edge — usually an image, a table, or a too-wide block.
Menus that don’t behave. A menu that needs a hover to open doesn’t work on a screen you tap.
Forms that are a chore. Tiny fields, the wrong keyboard popping up, labels you can’t read — every bit of friction loses a few more people.

NORM (a customer): I tried to tap “Call now” on me phone and accidentally rang a tile shop in Perth.

THE BOYS: That’s two buttons crammed into one thumb’s worth of space, Norm.

ELISE: If you can’t tap it cleanly, neither can a customer. Fix the spacing.

(The tile shop in Perth was lovely about it, apparently.) 🐨

A person comfortably reading a website on a phone on a Sydney street. — Most of your visitors will only ever meet you on a phone.

The 60-second test

Stop reading this on your computer for a second and pick up your phone. Open your own website and, like a real customer in a hurry:

Read your main message without zooming. Can you?
Tap your most important button — the one you actually want people to press. Easy, or fiddly?
Scroll the whole way down. Does anything spill sideways or run off the edge?
Fill in your contact form with your thumbs. Annoying, or fine?

The honest test: hand your phone, on your website, to someone who’s never seen it. Don’t help them. Just watch where they squint, pinch, or give up. That ten seconds of silence will tell you more than any analytics dashboard.

Google’s on a phone too

This isn’t only about manners. When Google decides how to rank you, it mostly looks at the mobile version of your site, not the desktop one. So a site that’s a pain on a phone isn’t just losing customers — it’s quietly losing ground in search, too. Tidy mobile is part of good SEO, not a separate job.

If your customers need a magnifying glass, your competitors only need a working website.

The good news: most mobile problems are layout, not catastrophe — fixable once you actually see them. Our free Website Check flags the common ones, and if you’d rather someone just sorted it, that’s what we’re here for.