Is My Website Mobile Friendly? How to Check for Free
The quickest way to find out if your website is mobile friendly is to open it on your own phone and try to do what a customer would: read the page, ring you, send an enquiry. If any of those needs a pinch, a zoom or a second attempt, it isn't. Google used to offer a free one-click test for this, but it retired that in 2023, so the phone in your pocket is now the most honest checker you've got.
What does "mobile friendly" actually mean?
A mobile friendly website is one that rearranges itself to fit a phone screen, rather than showing the desktop layout shrunk down. The text is readable at its normal size, nothing slides off the side, and every button can be hit with a thumb.
It's less mysterious than it sounds. Google's web.dev guidance on responsive design basics explains that without one line of setup code, called the viewport tag, a mobile browser draws the page at a desktop width, usually about 980 pixels, and then tries to squeeze it onto the screen. The same guidance points out that people expect to scroll a page up and down, not sideways, and that forcing them to scroll across or zoom out makes for a poor experience.
This is a different problem from speed. Our guide to mobile page speed covers how quickly a page appears. This one is about whether it works once it has.
How can you check if your website is mobile friendly?
Pick up your phone and switch off wifi, so you're on mobile data like a customer out and about. Then work through these six checks on your homepage and your contact page. Two minutes, no cost.
| Do this | Look for | If it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Open the homepage and do nothing | Can you read the words without pinching to zoom? | If the text is tiny and the whole page fits across the screen like a postage stamp, the site is showing its desktop layout, shrunk. |
| Drag a finger left and right | Does the page slide sideways? | Something on it is wider than the screen, usually a photo, a table or an embedded map. |
| Tap your phone number | Does the phone offer to ring it? | If nothing happens, the number is plain text, and someone has to copy it out by hand to call you. |
| Tap the menu and every button | Do you hit the one you meant, first time? | Links packed tightly together are easy to mis-tap with a thumb, and a menu that will not open hides every other page. |
| Fill in the contact form | Can you see what you are typing, and send it? | A form that sits behind the keyboard, or a send button pushed off the screen, loses the enquiry at the last step. |
| Turn the phone sideways, then back | Does the page rearrange itself cleanly? | A layout that breaks when the screen changes shape is a sign it was only ever checked on one size. |
Then hand it to someone else. A different phone, ideally an older or cheaper one than yours, catches what yours won't: a site can look fine on the handset it was built on and fall apart on a smaller screen.
What happened to Google's Mobile-Friendly Test?
Google switched it off. In a Search Central post, Google said that from 1 December 2023 it was retiring the Mobile Usability report in Search Console, the Mobile-Friendly Test tool and its API. Its reason was that other tools for checking mobile usability had appeared in the years since, and it named Lighthouse, a testing tool from Chrome, as one of them.
The same post is clear that this didn't mean mobile usability stopped mattering. Google said it remains critical for users and stays part of its page experience guidance. So if an old article or an agency's sales email tells you to "run the Google mobile test", that tool is gone. Lighthouse's reports are fairly technical, and they'll probably mean more to whoever looks after your site than to you.
Does Google care if your site isn't mobile friendly?
Yes, because Google now reads the phone version of your site first. Its mobile-first indexing documentation says Google uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with a smartphone, for indexing and ranking.
Which matters in one practical way. If your phone layout hides things the desktop version shows, say a services list tucked away or a prices section cut to save space, Google's guidance asks that the mobile site contains the same content as the desktop one. Content that only exists on the desktop version is content Google may never weigh up.
What nobody can honestly tell you is how many places you'd move up by fixing it. Google doesn't publish that, and anyone who promises a number is guessing. The better reason to fix it is the person holding the phone, thumb hovering over your number.
What should you do if your site fails?
That depends on how the site was built. It isn't always a new website.
- On a site builder. If your template was designed to adjust to phones, a failure is often one element rather than the whole page: an oversized photo, an embedded table or a widget pasted in from elsewhere. Look for the builder's mobile preview and fix that one piece.
- Built for you, in the last few years. Send whoever built it a short message: which page, which phone, and what went wrong from the table above. A screenshot helps. If you pay a monthly fee for care or maintenance, ask whether this is covered before you pay anyone extra for it.
- Built a long time ago and never touched. A site built before anyone designed for phones may have no mobile layout at all, and adding one after the fact can be a big enough job that starting again is the more honest answer. Get both priced.
If a rebuild is where you've landed, the guide to fixing your website and getting found sets out the other checks worth running at the same time. If you'd rather hand it over, a ByRender site starts from £495 with hosting, security, backups and edits from £69 a month, and you see a private preview before anything is owed. Tell us about your business and see yours on your own phone first.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a separate mobile version of my website?
No, and for a small business it is usually the harder route. Google's own mobile-first indexing guidance recommends responsive design, one page at one address that rearranges itself to fit the screen, because it is the easiest pattern to build and keep up to date. A separate mobile site means two versions to keep in step, and Google warns that the mobile version needs the same content as the desktop one.
Is a mobile friendly website the same as a fast one?
No. They are two separate failures that happen to show up on the same phone. A page can load almost instantly and still be unreadable because the layout was built for a desktop screen, and a page with a perfect phone layout can still take an age to appear on patchy signal. It is worth checking both.