Is my website mobile friendly? How to check it yourself

Is my website mobile friendly? If you type that into Google hoping for its mobile friendly test, you won’t find the tool any more. Google switched off the Mobile-Friendly Test, its API and the Mobile Usability report in Search Console in December 2023, and pointed site owners to Lighthouse instead. Lighthouse gives you scores, but no plain yes or no.

The question still matters. On housesitter.ie, a site I look after, 75 of 86 clicks from Google over four weeks this autumn came from phones. Google also uses the mobile version of a page for indexing and ranking. If important content or links are missing from the mobile version, Google may not be able to use them.

You don’t need a tool to answer it. These are the checks I run when I look at a small business website, in the order I do them.

1. Use your own phone, properly

Open the site on your phone, not on a laptop with the window made narrow. Then do what a customer would do:

• Read the first paragraph without zooming. If you have to pinch, the text is too small or you are looking at a shrunk desktop layout.
• Swipe left. If the page moves sideways, something is wider than the screen. Usually it’s an image, a table or an embedded map.
• Open the menu and tap every item.
• Tap the phone number. It should open the dialler. If nothing happens, the number is plain text and not a tel: link.
• Fill in the contact form and send it. Watch whether the keyboard covers the send button.
• Turn the phone sideways once.

If you can, repeat it on a second phone, ideally an older Android with a small screen. A lot of owners only ever see their site on a new iPhone.

2. Look for the viewport line

This is the quickest technical check. On a laptop, open the page and press Ctrl+U (Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) to see the source. Search it with Ctrl+F for “viewport”. A mobile-ready page has a line like this:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Without it, the phone pretends to be a desktop screen about 980 pixels wide and shrinks the whole page to fit. Last week I went through 27 websites of health businesses around Dundalk. One had exactly this problem: no viewport line, so the phone showed the 988-pixel desktop layout as a miniature. Everything was there, and nobody could read it without zooming.

If you find this on your own site, don’t just add the line. A layout built for a fixed width then breaks differently, with columns cut off at the right edge. The theme needs responsive styles behind the tag. On an old WordPress theme that usually means changing the theme, not editing one line.

3. See what Google’s smartphone crawler sees

If your site is in Google Search Console, paste a page address into the search bar at the top (URL Inspection). Click “Test live URL”, then “View tested page” and open the Screenshot tab. That is how Google’s URL Inspection tool rendered your page on a smartphone. The screenshot only appears when the live test succeeds. If it fails, Search Console says why, and that reason is worth reading too.

This catches problems your own phone hides. If a cookie banner or a plugin blocks the content, or a script fails to load for the crawler, the screenshot shows a half-empty page. Your phone, with everything already cached, still looks fine.

4. Check the widths in between

Phones and desktops get tested. Tablets and small laptops often don’t. Somewhere between 750 and 1,024 pixels, menus wrap onto two lines, columns get squeezed and side margins disappear.

I found two of these on housesitter.ie in October. At tablet width the text ran right to the edge of the screen, and at about 750 pixels the menu broke onto a second line. Neither showed on a phone or on a desktop.

To test this in Chrome, press F12, then Ctrl+Shift+M for device mode. Choose “Responsive” and drag the width slowly from 1,300 down to 360. Watch for the point where something jumps. Device mode only changes the screen size, so use it after step 1, not instead of it.

5. Run Lighthouse, but don’t rely on the score alone

PageSpeed Insights runs Lighthouse on the mobile version by default. The performance score at the top measures loading speed on a simulated phone with a throttled connection. That is useful, but it doesn’t tell you whether a person can use the page. I wrote more about this in Free website checker tools: what the score misses.

Scroll down past the score. The row of small screenshots shows how the page builds up on a slow connection, and the findings underneath list what slows it down. Lighthouse also still checks for the viewport line. Use it for speed, and the first four checks for whether the page works on a phone.

What usually goes wrong

On the small business sites I’ve looked at, the same faults keep coming back. Old themes without the viewport line. Phone numbers as plain text. Embedded maps and price tables wider than the screen. And pop-ups for cookies or newsletters that cover the page, with the close button out of reach. Google’s page experience guidance names intrusive pop-ups on mobile as a problem, so that last one can cost you in search as well as with visitors.

What if my website isn’t mobile friendly?

Some of these you can usually fix yourself in WordPress. A phone number becomes tappable once it’s a tel: link. A wide price table can turn into a short list on the page. Most cookie and newsletter plugins have a setting for how and when the pop-up appears on phones. An oversized image can be swapped for a smaller one.

Layout problems are a different job. A missing viewport line nearly always comes from the theme. A page that scrolls sideways everywhere, or a menu that breaks at tablet width, can also come from a plugin or a single element in the page layout. Changes to the theme affect every page at once, so I’d test them on a staging copy first and not on the live site. If the theme hasn’t had an update in years, fixing it from the inside is often more work than moving to a current one.

If you want to go through the other basics as well, the free Website Health Check on otta.ie is a self-check you fill in yourself, without a login. If your site fails the layout checks and you’d like someone to look at the theme, get in touch. For a broader look at whether your site does its job, see How to check whether your business website is actually working.