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How it got built
Not one person involved decided to ignore the customers arriving on a phone. It happened anyway, because every decision was made by somebody looking at a big screen.
About 9 minutes
The short version
At some point you have opened your own website on your own phone and felt something go slightly wrong. Not broken. Just heavier than it should be. The menu is a small symbol in the corner. Your phone number is down past the photos. Everything works, and nothing is where your hand expects it.
The natural conclusion is that somebody did not do their job. It is worth saying early that this is usually not what happened, because the real explanation is more useful and quite a lot more annoying.
Everybody involved already knew most of your customers would arrive on a phone. Nobody disputed it. It made no difference.
Whoever built your site could build one that works beautifully in one hand. The knowledge is not rare and it is not expensive. It simply never came up, because nothing in the process that produced your website ever required anybody to hold a phone.
There are about five ways a small business in this country ends up with a website. It is worth looking at them for one specific reason, which is that not one of them contains a step where somebody stands up.
The directory company
The people who used to sell you a listing in a book. The website came bundled with the advertising, and the sales call happened over a laptop.
A template you picked yourself
Chosen from a gallery of wide screenshots, because that is how a gallery of templates is displayed.
A local design studio
Often somebody whose training was print. A page is a fixed shape in print, and the habit is hard to put down.
Somebody's cousin who does websites
Built on a twenty-four inch monitor with a mouse, at a desk, in the evening. Genuinely capable, and never once standing up.
A builder aimed at your trade
Pre-loaded with the copy and the photos for your industry. Fast to launch, and every one of its decisions was made before it met you.
The sentence that does the damage is never
“Phones do not matter.”
It is
“We’ll check it on a phone at the end.”
Somebody made your website while sitting at a desk. Both hands free. A screen two feet wide. A mouse, which lands exactly where it is pointed. Good light, an office chair, fast internet, and as long as they needed.
In those conditions every website ever made is excellent. Small text is legible because you can lean in. A menu in the top corner is a flick of the wrist. A page that takes four seconds is fine, because you were not going anywhere. Nothing is difficult, so nothing gets found.
Now think about where it gets used.
Where it was made
Where it gets used
Your customer is in a car park, or a hallway, or the front seat. They have one hand on the phone and something in the other. They are deciding between you and two other names, and they will give each of you about the length of a traffic light.
This is not an argument that anybody was careless. It is an argument about what a good working setup hides. Every difficulty your customer is about to have was invisible in that chair, and a problem nobody can see does not get raised, quoted for or fixed.
Which is why the habits your customer actually arrived with are worth knowing about before anything gets drawn: what the world’s biggest businesses learnt about the thumb.
This is the part you can go and check in about ten seconds, and it is the clearest evidence in this whole piece. Log in to wherever your website is edited. Look at the canvas you are given to work on.
It is wide. It is the shape of a computer screen, because it is being displayed on one. And somewhere on it, usually small and usually at the top or the bottom, there is a little phone symbol you can click to see the other version.
That is the whole story in one screen. The desktop layout is the document. The phone is a view of it.
So the work happens in an order, and the order decides the result. Everything gets arranged on the wide canvas until it looks right. Then somebody clicks the phone symbol, finds two headings overlapping, nudges them apart, and saves. The mobile version was never designed. It was repaired.
It makes everything narrower
Reliably, and better than most people would do it by hand. This part is genuinely solved.
It stacks your columns
Three across becomes three down, in the order they happened to be written in.
It cannot reorder your priorities
Whatever was decorative at the top of a wide screen is still at the top, now taking up the entire first screenful.
It cannot know why somebody came
It has no idea that the one thing that matters on this page is the phone number, because nothing ever told it.
Worth saying plainly, because it would be easy to read the last three minutes as an argument that website builders are the problem. They are not. They handle the genuinely technical half of this properly, and it is the half most people would get wrong on their own.
What no piece of software can do is decide which single thing on the page matters most to somebody who has thirty seconds and one thumb. That is a judgement about your business, and it can only be made by somebody who knows why people ring you.
For most of the history of the web, Google looked at websites the way a computer would. That changed gradually and then finished completely: since the end of 2023, the version of your site that Google reads is the one a phone gets. In the middle of 2024 it went a step further, and a site that fails badly enough on a phone stopped being read at all.
Both of those are Google saying so in its own documentation, not somebody’s theory about rankings. And the consequence for a small business is very specific.
Anything trimmed off the phone version to keep the page short is now invisible. Not less important. Not there.
This matters because hiding things on the small version is a common and entirely well-meant tidying-up. A long list of the suburbs you cover. Three paragraphs explaining a service. A block of qualifications. On a wide screen they sit comfortably in a side column, and on a phone they make the page enormous, so out they come.
That was sensible advice once. It is now the same as never having written them.
Which raises a fair question about the reports you have been sent over the years, and it has its own answer: mobile-friendly checked four things.
It would be convenient to tell you this means Google now favours sites that work well on a phone, and plenty of people will. It does not say that. It decides which version of your page gets read, not how highly it gets placed.
Which is the less exciting version and the more useful one. Nobody is handing out points. They are simply reading a different copy of your website to the one you were shown when you approved it.
None of this is an argument that nobody uses a computer. If you do commercial work, a good share of your enquiries come from somebody sitting at an office desk in the middle of a Tuesday. Property managers, offices, strata, insurers, and anyone booking you from work.
The argument is not that the wide version stopped mattering. It is that it stopped being the one everything gets decided on.
Ten minutes, on your own phone, on your own website. One condition decides all of it: do them standing up, with one hand, ideally somewhere with poor reception. Sat at your desk with both hands free, every website in the world passes. Nothing here gets scored and there is nothing to send anybody.
If three of those go badly, that is not three faults. It is one decision, made once, showing up in three places. Which is oddly good news, because a single cause is a great deal cheaper to deal with than five separate ones.
Your website was never tested the way it gets used.
So go and use it.Do the tap test. It takes four seconds, it is the one people are most often surprised by, and the thing it catches is the phone number, which is the single most valuable control on a website belonging to a business that gets paid over the phone.
Your current website may well come through all five of those perfectly, and if it does, the correct thing to do about this article is nothing at all. Plenty of sites get most of this right without anybody having set out to.
But whenever the next one gets built, whoever builds it, there are two things to ask for and neither of them costs anything. Ask to be shown the phone version first, before the wide one exists. And do the approving standing up, on your own phone, rather than sitting at a desk looking at a picture of a website.
That is the entire fix for the process. It is free, it takes no expertise, and it is the reason this piece is about a chair rather than about a website.
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