Most business owners check their website on their own computer. The page looks fine, the buttons work, everything is readable. So they assume the website is doing its job.
The problem is that most of your customers are not visiting on a desktop. They are on their phones, often on the move, on a slower connection, with a smaller screen and a thumb instead of a mouse. And what looks fine on your laptop can be a frustrating experience on a phone.
Why mobile and desktop perform so differently
Your page is the same page regardless of what device someone views it on. But the experience it delivers is very different depending on the screen size, processing power, and connection speed of that device.
A large, high-resolution image that loads almost instantly on your office broadband might take four or five seconds on a mobile connection. A navigation menu that works perfectly with a mouse might be impossible to tap accurately with a thumb. A block of text that is easy to read on a 15-inch screen might be so small on a phone that visitors give up and scroll past it.
These are not cosmetic issues. Each one costs you customers.
The specific things that break on mobile
The most common mobile problems are:
- Buttons and links that are too small to tap. The recommended minimum tap target size is 44 pixels. Smaller than that and people miss, get frustrated, and leave.
- Text that is too small to read without zooming. If visitors have to pinch and zoom to read your content, most will not bother.
- Images that take too long to load. Large uncompressed images are the single most common cause of slow mobile pages.
- Elements that shift around while loading. If the page jumps as content appears, visitors tap the wrong thing and lose trust in the page immediately.
- Forms that are difficult to fill in. Enquiry forms, booking forms, and checkout flows are far harder to complete on a small screen if they are not built with mobile in mind.
How to find out if mobile is a problem for you
The simplest thing is to pick up your phone, go to your own website, and actually use it as a customer would. Try to find your contact details. Try to click the enquiry button. Read a paragraph of your homepage copy. How does it feel?
Then do the same thing on someone else's phone, a different model, possibly an older one. Your regular customers are not all using the latest flagship device. Many are on mid-range phones two or three years old, with average-speed mobile data.
A free page audit will show you the technical side of this: a mobile performance score, a usability score, and a list of specific issues flagged on mobile compared to desktop. This is useful because it identifies problems that are invisible to the naked eye, like unused code slowing down the initial load, or a viewport setting that is preventing the page from scaling correctly.
What to do if your mobile score is low
The good news is that most mobile problems come from a small number of fixable causes. Compressing your images alone often produces a dramatic improvement in load time. Adjusting button sizes is usually a simple CSS change. Most of these fixes do not require rebuilding your site, they are targeted changes that a developer can make in a few hours, or that you can make yourself if you are using a website builder like Squarespace, Wix, or WordPress.
The key is knowing which specific fixes will have the most impact on your particular page, rather than trying to improve everything at once.
A free scanmy.page audit checks both mobile and desktop performance and shows you exactly where the gap is, with plain English descriptions of what is wrong and what to fix first.
See how your page performs on mobile vs desktop
Get desktop and mobile scores side by side, with specific fixes for the issues that are costing you the most visitors. Free, no account needed, results in about 60 seconds.
Scan my page for free →