Most of your customers are on a phone. Is your site ready?
Your website probably looks fine on your laptop. That is not where your customers are. Here is what breaks on a phone, and how to tell if yours does.
Open your website on your own phone right now. Actually do it, before you read on.
The short version
Most of your customers only ever see your site on a phone, but most sites are designed and approved on a laptop, where everything looks fine.
So the phone version quietly falls apart, and nobody who could fix it ever sees the problem.
Text too small to read, buttons too close together, menus that will not open and forms that fight you all cost you customers.
The only real test is someone sitting with your site on a real phone and trying to do what a customer would do.
Not most-ish. Most. And yet almost every site still gets designed, reviewed and signed off on a big screen, usually by the two or three people who will never once look at it any other way. The version everybody actually sees is the version nobody checks.
Five things that break on a phone
Text too small to read. The visitor has to pinch and zoom to make out your own words. Most will not. They will just leave.
Buttons too close together. On a laptop with a mouse, fine. On a phone with a thumb, they tap the wrong thing, get frustrated, and go.
A menu that will not open. More common than you would think. The one that works perfectly with a mouse does nothing to a thumb, and now the visitor is stuck on one page with no way around.
Images that shove everything sideways. A photo that was not sized for a phone pushes the layout out of shape, and suddenly the page looks broken.
A form that fights you. Fields that will not focus, a keyboard that covers the button, a submit that does nothing. Every one of these is a customer who tried and gave up.
You would never know any of it, because on your laptop it all looks perfect.
“It works on my computer” is not the test.
The real test is a cheap phone on a slow connection
“It works on my computer” is not the test. The test is: does it work on a cheap phone, on a slow connection, held by an impatient person who has three other tabs open?
That is your actual customer. And the only way to know is for someone to sit with the site on a real phone and try to do the things a customer would do. Not skim it. Do it. Call you. Find your prices. Send a message.
Most people never do this. The ones who do win the customers that everyone else is quietly losing.