Your website is a phone website, and it probably was not designed like one

Look at where your visitors actually come from and the number is usually somewhere between seventy and ninety five percent mobile. For a local business it is closer to the top of that range, because people search for you while they are out, in a car, or standing in someone else's kitchen.

Almost every website is still designed on a large monitor. That gap is where most of the damage happens.

What breaks, specifically

The same handful of problems, on site after site:

Hero text that is unreadable. A headline sized for a wide screen becomes six lines on a phone, sitting over the busiest part of a photo. The first thing a visitor sees is the thing that works worst.

The phone number is not tappable. It is text, or it is an image, or it is in the footer four screens down. On a phone, a phone number should be a tap, and it should be visible without scrolling.

Tables and price lists that scroll sideways. The page itself slides left and right, which feels broken even when the content is fine.

Photos that weigh four megabytes. On a home connection nobody notices. On mobile data in a weak signal area, the page is blank for six seconds and the visitor is gone.

Buttons too small or too close together. A link that is easy to click with a mouse is a coin toss with a thumb.

A pop-up that cannot be closed. The close button is off screen. This one costs you the visitor entirely.

The five minute audit

Do this on your own phone, on mobile data rather than your office wifi, because that is the real condition.

1. Open your home page and count the seconds until you can read something.
2. Read the headline without zooming. Can you?
3. Find your phone number without scrolling. Tap it. Does it dial?
4. Try to book or enquire, all the way through, with one thumb.
5. Turn the phone sideways. Does anything fall apart?
6. Look for a price list or a table. Does the page slide sideways?

Whatever failed is what to fix first. It will almost always be more valuable than a redesign.

Why responsive is not the same as designed

Most tools are responsive, meaning the layout rearranges itself to fit a narrow screen. That solves the mechanics and not the design. Rearranged is not the same as considered.

A phone screen is a different medium. There is one column, one thing visible at a time, and the visitor is usually in a hurry and often distracted. What deserves the top of the screen on a phone is frequently not what deserves it on a desktop. The desktop version can afford an atmospheric hero. The phone version often needs the name of the business, what you do, and a button that calls you.

That is a decision, and it has to be made deliberately, per device. Automatic rearrangement cannot make it for you.

What to do about it

If your tool lets you set values per device, spend an hour on the phone version specifically. Smaller headline, more space around the buttons, the call to action higher, the big photo cropped rather than shrunk.

If your tool does not let you change the phone version separately, that is worth knowing, because it means the mobile experience is a side effect of a desktop decision, and mobile is the majority of your traffic.

Every Instinctor element carries separate settings for desktop, tablet, and phone, and the editor previews each one. We built it that way because the desktop version of a small business site is, statistically, the version almost nobody sees.

The Instinctor team