The 5-Minute Phone Test for Your Business Website

When did you last look at your own website on your phone? Not on the office computer, but the way a customer would: on a phone, on mobile data, probably while doing something else.

For most small businesses, a phone is where the first impression happens. Here are five checks you can do in about five minutes. You don’t need any technical knowledge, just your phone and a bit of honesty.

1. Does it load quickly?

Switch off Wi-Fi and open your website on mobile data. If you find yourself staring at a blank screen, your customers are too, and many will give up and go back to Google. Large photos that haven’t been prepared for the web are the most common cause.

2. Can you read it without zooming?

If you have to pinch and zoom to read the text, or scroll sideways to see the whole page, the site wasn’t built with phones in mind. Text should be comfortable to read at arm’s length.

3. Tap the phone number

It should start a call straight away. If nothing happens, or you can’t find the number without hunting through menus, you are making it harder for people to ring you. The same goes for your email address and your address on a map.

4. Try the menu and the buttons

Open the menu, tap through to a couple of pages and come back. Are the buttons big enough to hit first time? Does anything pop up and cover the page? Small annoyances add up quickly on a small screen.

5. Fill in your own contact form

Send yourself an enquiry from your phone. Was it easy? Did it ask for more than you need? Did the message actually arrive? You would be surprised how often a form has quietly stopped working and nobody noticed.

How did it do?

If your website passed all five, well done. If it stumbled on one or two, those are usually quick fixes. If it struggled with most of them, it may have been built before phones mattered as much as they do now, and a website re-design is likely to be the better investment. Every site we design is built to work on phones first.

These five checks are part of our free 15-point website checklist, which also covers first impressions, trust, being found on Google and turning visitors into enquiries.

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