Works on phones

Mobile-friendly test

Google retired its Mobile-Friendly Test at the end of 2023. This checks the same ground and rather more: whether your page fits a phone screen, whether visitors can zoom, whether anything scrolls sideways, and whether tapping your phone number actually starts a call.

Free
No account
Usually under a minute

What this checks

Every one of these is measured directly on your page and reported with the evidence attached.

Fits phone screens: Whether the page declares how it should be sized on a phone. Without it, a mobile browser renders a desktop layout shrunk to fit and everything is unreadable.
Pinch to zoom: Whether zooming has been disabled. Some sites switch it off for tidiness, which locks out anyone with imperfect eyesight.
Sideways scrolling: Whether something on the page is wider than the screen. Usually one image, one table or one embed — and it makes the whole page feel broken.
Tap to call: Whether your phone number is a link that opens the dialler, or just text that does nothing when tapped.
Phone number: Whether a phone number is on the page at all, and findable without hunting.

These run alongside the rest of the audit — every scan covers all six areas, so you get speed, works on phones, found on google, secure, looks legitimate and easy to contact whichever page you started from.

What happened to Google's Mobile-Friendly Test

Google retired the standalone Mobile-Friendly Test, its Rich Results counterpart for mobile usability, and the mobile usability report in Search Console in December 2023. The stated reasoning was that the mobile web had matured to the point where a pass/fail badge was no longer the most useful thing to publish.

It is worth being precise about what that did and did not mean, because a lot of writing on this subject gets it backwards. The tool went. The requirement did not. Google still crawls and ranks the mobile version of your site rather than the desktop one. A site that fails on phones is not being penalised on top of its ranking — the failing version is the version being ranked.

What changed is that you no longer get a single green tick, and are expected to look at the underlying measurements instead. That is what this page does.

Mobile-first indexing, stated plainly

Google indexes the mobile version of your pages. Not the desktop version, with mobile as a secondary consideration — the mobile version, full stop.

The practical consequence catches people out: if content exists on your desktop pages but is removed on mobile, that content effectively does not exist for ranking. Content hidden inside a collapsed accordion is fine, because it is still in the page and gets indexed normally. Content genuinely stripped out for small screens is not.

So "we have a mobile version" is no longer a courtesy to phone users. It is the version of your website that search engines read.

The check that is worth actual money

Of everything on this page, tap-to-call is the one with the shortest line to revenue, and it fails constantly.

A phone number typed as ordinary text is just characters. Tapping it does nothing. A visitor who wants to call you has to memorise it, leave your site, open the dialler and type it in — and a meaningful proportion will not bother.

The same number marked up as a link opens the dialler with the number already filled in. It is a trivial change, it costs nothing, and on a business where the phone is how customers buy, it is one of the highest-return fixes available anywhere on the site. We check for it specifically because most audit tools do not check for it at all.

What an automated check can and cannot see

Everything listed above is mechanically verifiable: the viewport declaration is present or absent, zoom is disabled or it is not, an element overflows the screen width or it does not, the number is a link or it is text. Those we report as findings.

What no scan can judge is whether the page is pleasant on a phone. Whether the navigation makes sense with a thumb. Whether the form is a chore to fill in on a small keyboard. Whether the popup that appears after two seconds is the reason people leave.

For those, there is no substitute for opening your own site on your own phone, on mobile data, and trying to do what a customer would do. Our five-minute mobile test is that walkthrough. Run this scan for the measurable half, then spend five minutes on the half that needs a person.

Common questions

Is Google's Mobile-Friendly Test gone for good?

Yes. The standalone tool and the Search Console mobile usability report were both retired in December 2023. Lighthouse, which runs inside Chrome and inside PageSpeed Insights, is the replacement Google points people at — along with simply using the site on a phone.

Does mobile-friendliness still affect rankings?

Yes, and more directly than before. Because Google indexes the mobile version of your site, a problem on mobile is not an additional penalty — it is the version of your page being judged.

How big should buttons and links be on mobile?

At least 48 by 48 pixels, with roughly 8 pixels of clear space between adjacent targets. That is about the size of an adult fingertip. Lists of links stacked tightly together are the most common failure.

Why can I scroll sideways on my own site?

Something on the page is wider than the screen. It is nearly always an image with a fixed width, a table, an embedded map or video, or a long unbroken string such as an email address inside a heading.

Should I have a separate mobile site?

Almost certainly not. A separate mobile site means two sets of content to keep in step and two sets of addresses for search engines to reconcile. A single responsive site that adapts to the screen is the standard approach and the one that causes fewest problems.