Over two years I audited the digital operations of 55 small and medium businesses. 35 of them had mobile usability problems.
Not subtle technical things you’d need a developer to spot. I mean buttons too small to tap. Text you had to pinch-zoom to read. Navigation menus that collapsed into something unusable the moment you shrank the screen below laptop size.
One business had a contact form that worked perfectly on desktop. On a phone, the submit button sat behind the keyboard. It was literally impossible to send an enquiry from a mobile device. This was their primary lead generation tool. More than half their visitors couldn’t use it.
Every single one of these businesses would have told you their website was mobile friendly. Most of them genuinely believed it was.
The problems that kept coming up
After 55 audits, the same issues appeared so often I could almost predict them before I looked.
Page speed was the worst offender. 29 out of 55 businesses had speed problems on mobile. One site scored 23 out of 100 on Google’s own mobile speed test. Another managed 30 on mobile versus 58 on desktop, which tells you everything about how much attention the mobile experience was getting. Pages that take more than three seconds to load on a phone lose roughly half their visitors before anything even appears. That’s not a statistic I’m making up. Google published it.
Navigation was the second most common issue. Menus designed for a wide desktop screen that either broke completely on mobile or became so cramped they were impossible to use accurately with a thumb. One business had navigation text so long it wrapped across three lines on a phone, pushing the actual content below the fold entirely.
Then there were the call-to-action problems. Buttons that disappeared below the fold on smaller screens. ‘Get a quote’ prompts that were visible on desktop but nowhere to be found on mobile. Contact phone numbers buried in places that required three or four taps to reach. If someone is on their phone and wants to call you, finding your number should take one tap. Not a treasure hunt.
Images caused problems too. Photos and graphics sized for desktop that pushed content sideways on mobile, creating that awkward horizontal scroll that makes the whole page feel broken. Product images that loaded at full resolution on 4G connections, dragging page speed down with them.
Why you think your site is fine (and why you’re probably wrong)
Here’s the gap. When you check your website on your phone, you do it on a recent model, connected to your home wifi, sitting in good lighting, already knowing where everything is. Your customers are doing it on a three-year-old handset, on 4G, on a bus, squinting at a screen in direct sunlight, with no idea where your contact form lives.
The difference between those two experiences is where the problems hide.
There’s also a technical shift that many businesses still haven’t caught up with. Google now uses your mobile site as the primary version for indexing and ranking. Not the desktop version. Your mobile site isn’t the secondary experience any more. As far as Google is concerned, it IS your website. If it’s slow, hard to use or broken, that’s the version Google is judging you on.
The five-minute self-audit
You can check most of this yourself right now. Get your phone out. Open your website. Then actually try to do the things you want your customers to do.
- Find your phone number. How many taps did it take? Can you tap it to call directly, or do you have to memorise it and switch to the dialler?
- Fill in your contact form. Does it work? Can you see the submit button? Does it actually send?
- If you sell online, try buying something. Add it to the basket. Go through the checkout. Does anything break?
- Navigate to a service page that isn’t linked from the homepage. How many taps? Did the menu work properly?
- Read a full paragraph of text. Did you have to zoom in? Could you read it comfortably?
- Time how long each page takes to appear. If you’re waiting more than three seconds, your customers are leaving.
For a more technical check, run your site through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool at pagespeed.web.dev. It’ll give you a score out of 100 for both mobile and desktop, and tell you exactly what’s slowing things down. Anything under 50 on mobile needs attention. Under 30 needs urgent attention.
What to fix first
If the self-audit turned up problems, here’s the order I’d tackle them.
Fix the contact form first. If people can’t get in touch with you, nothing else matters. Check that it displays properly, that every field is usable on a small screen and that the submit button is visible and tappable. This is a ten-minute fix in most cases.
Then tackle page speed. The biggest gains usually come from compressing images (most business websites serve images far larger than they need to be) and removing plugins or scripts you’re not actually using. If you’re on WordPress, install a caching plugin and an image compression plugin. Both free. Both make an immediate difference.
Then navigation. If your menu doesn’t work properly on mobile, it needs fixing. Sometimes it’s as simple as shortening the text in menu items. Sometimes it needs a proper mobile menu (the three-line ‘hamburger’ icon that opens into a full-screen menu). Your web developer can do this in a couple of hours.
Then content readability. Font sizes that work on desktop can be too small on mobile. Paragraphs that look fine on a wide screen become walls of text on a phone. Break things up. Use shorter paragraphs. Make sure headings are clear.
The good news is that most of these fixes are cheap or free. Compressing images costs nothing. Adjusting button sizes costs nothing. Most mobile problems are tweaks, not rebuilds. In two years of auditing I only recommended a full responsive redesign a handful of times. Usually the existing site just needed someone to actually test it on a phone and fix what was broken.
If 64% had these problems, where does that leave you?
I audited 55 businesses across every sector imaginable. Manufacturers, charities, retailers, recruitment firms, creative agencies, food producers. 35 of them had mobile usability issues they didn’t know about.
These weren’t careless businesses. They cared about their customers and their online presence. They just hadn’t done the one thing that reveals the problems: picked up a phone, pretended to be a customer and tried to use their own site.
Five minutes with your phone this afternoon will tell you whether you’re in the 36% or the 64%. And if you’re in the 64%, most of what needs fixing won’t cost you much more than another afternoon.
This article is part of a series based on findings from 55 digital audits. Read the full case study for the complete picture, or get in touch if you’d like to know where your business stands.
