How to Check If Your Website Is Mobile Friendly (60-Second Test)

Quick answer: spend 1 minute using your site on your own phone, then run it through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights on the Mobile tab. Google retired its old Mobile-Friendly Test; that address now redirects to its Lighthouse documentation (checked October 2026). If text is too small to read, buttons are hard to tap, or you have to pinch and zoom, Google counts that against you and so do your customers.

Why this matters more than it used to

Google indexes the mobile version of your site, not the desktop one. That means if your site is awkward on a phone, it is the awkward version being judged for rankings, even for people who later visit on a laptop. And most local searches, especially anything urgent like a leak or a broken boiler, happen on a phone in the first place.

The 60-second check you can do yourself

1. Open your site on your own phone, on mobile data rather than wifi. Wifi hides slowness.
2. Count the seconds until you can read something useful. Over three and you are losing people.
3. Try to phone yourself. Is there a tap-to-call button, or do you have to copy a number out?
4. Try to fill in the contact form with one thumb. If it is fiddly, it is costing you enquiries.
5. Check the text size. If you are pinching to zoom, so is everyone else.

The three things that fail most often

• No viewport tag. A single missing line of code makes a site render as a shrunken desktop page. It is the most common fault we see on older small business sites.
• Huge images. A photo straight off a phone can be 5MB. On mobile data that is several seconds of blank screen.
• Tap targets too close together. Menu links stacked tightly means people hit the wrong one and give up.

How to check the viewport tag in ten seconds

On a desktop browser, right-click your homepage, choose View Page Source, and search for viewport. You are looking for a line like this in the head:

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

If it is not there, that is your problem, and it is a five-minute fix for whoever built the site.

What Google’s test does and does not tell you

A good mobile score checks how the page loads and renders, not whether it is useful. A site can score well and still be slow on a real phone signal, still bury your phone number, and still lose the job. Treat a pass as the floor, not the finish line.

Related: what mobile-first actually means, signs a website is costing you customers, and Core Web Vitals explained.