Does Google judge a website on its mobile version?
Yes. Google now uses the mobile version as the primary version for indexing and ranking, so a slow or broken mobile site is the site Google is judging.
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The mobile usability gap: why 64% of small business websites still fail on phones
Probably not as well as you think. 35 of the 55 businesses I audited, 64%, had mobile usability problems, and every one would have said its site was mobile friendly. The common faults were slow pages, with 29 of the 55 having mobile speed problems, menus that broke on small screens, calls to action that vanished below the fold, and images that pushed content sideways. One contact form's submit button sat behind the phone's keyboard. Test your own site on a phone as a customer would, and fix the form first.
What mobile problems did the audits find?
Obvious ones, not subtle technical faults. Over two years I audited the digital operations of 55 small and medium businesses, and 35 had mobile usability problems: buttons too small to tap, text you had to pinch-zoom to read, and menus that collapsed into something unusable below laptop width. One business's contact form worked perfectly on desktop, but on a phone the submit button sat behind the keyboard, so nobody could send an enquiry from a mobile, through the main lead generation tool of a site where more than half the visitors used phones.
Page speed was the worst offender: 29 of the 55 had mobile speed problems. One site scored 23 out of 100 on Google's own mobile speed test, and another managed 30 on mobile against 58 on desktop. Google has published that pages taking more than three seconds to load on a phone lose roughly half their visitors. Navigation came next, with one site's menu text wrapping across three lines on a phone and pushing the content below the fold. Calls to action disappeared on smaller screens, phone numbers took three or four taps to reach, and images sized for desktop pushed pages sideways or loaded at full resolution on 4G.
These were businesses in every sector, manufacturers, charities, retailers, recruitment firms, creative agencies and food producers, and they cared about their customers. They had simply never picked up a phone, pretended to be a customer and tried to use their own site.
Why do owners think their site works on a phone?
Because they test it in the wrong conditions. You check your site on a recent phone, on home wifi, in good light, already knowing where everything is. Your customers use a three-year-old handset on 4G, on a bus, in sunlight, with no idea where your contact form is, and that difference is where the problems hide. It matters more because Google now uses the mobile version of a site as the primary version for indexing and ranking, so the mobile site is the one Google judges.
How can you test your own site on a phone?
Try to do what your customers do. Find your phone number and count the taps, and check you can tap it to call. Fill in the contact form and see whether the submit button is visible and the form sends. If you sell online, buy something. Navigate to a service page that is not linked from the homepage. Read a full paragraph without zooming, and time how long pages take to appear. For a technical check, run the site through Google's free PageSpeed Insights, which scores mobile and desktop out of 100: anything under 50 on mobile needs attention and under 30 needs it urgently.
What should you fix first?
The contact form, because nothing else matters if people cannot reach you, and in most cases it is a ten-minute fix. Then page speed, where the biggest gains usually come from compressing images and removing plugins or scripts you do not use, plus caching and image compression plugins on WordPress. Then navigation, which may only need shorter menu text or a proper mobile menu. Then readability: larger fonts and shorter paragraphs. Most of these fixes are cheap or free. In two years of auditing I recommended a full responsive redesign only a handful of times; usually the site just needed someone to test it on a phone and fix what was broken. Five minutes with a phone tells you whether you are in the 36% or the 64%.
Related evidence: 55 digital audits. Here’s what I found.. Earlier in this journey: Your homepage is about your customer, not your company.
Questions people ask
What is a good mobile PageSpeed score?
Anything under 50 on Google's PageSpeed Insights needs attention, and anything under 30 needs urgent attention.
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