Somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of the visits to a typical Australian small business website arrive on a phone. Google has indexed the mobile version of your site, not the desktop one, since 2019. So when a page is awkward on a phone, it is not a minor inconvenience for a minority of visitors. It is the version of your business almost everyone sees, and the only version Google grades.
Google ran a free Mobile-Friendly Test for years, then switched it off in December 2023 and pointed people at tools that answer a different question. This is the straightforward replacement. We request your page with an iPhone user agent, because plenty of sites still serve different markup to phones, and read what comes back: the viewport tag, anything pinned wider than a screen, images that cannot shrink, text set too small, and the form-field trap that makes an iPhone zoom in and refuse to zoom back out.
Test my site- Viewport tag and whether the layout is tied to the screen
- Elements pinned wider than a phone, which cause sideways scrolling
- Images that cannot shrink, and images sent at full desktop size
- Text declared too small to read comfortably
- Form fields that make iPhones zoom in and never zoom back out
- Pinch zoom, wide tables, plugin content and arrival pop-ups
Why did Google turn off its Mobile-Friendly Test?
Because it had done its job. When the test launched in 2015 a large share of the web was still desktop-only, and Google needed a blunt instrument to push the industry along. By 2023 responsive design was the default and the pass rate was so high the tool told most people nothing. Google retired it and folded mobile usability into Search Console, which is useful if you own the site and have Search Console set up, and useless if you want to check a page in ten seconds, or check a competitor. That gap is what this fills.
What actually makes a page fail on a phone?
Almost always one of five things. A missing viewport meta tag, so the phone renders at desktop width and shrinks everything to unreadable. Something pinned to a fixed pixel width, usually a table, an image or an old embed, forcing the whole page to scroll sideways. Text set below 12px. Tap targets crowded together. And form fields set below 16px, which makes Safari on iPhone zoom the page in the moment somebody taps one, and never zoom back out. That last one is the single most common reason a mobile enquiry form gets abandoned.
Is a responsive site the same as a mobile-friendly one?
No, and this is where a lot of sites quietly lose people. Responsive means the layout reflows. Mobile-friendly means the result is genuinely usable at arm's length with a thumb. A page can reflow perfectly and still ship a 3 MB hero image to a phone on a train, or stack a navigation menu into fourteen items you have to scroll past on every page, or put a phone number in text so small it needs pinching. Reflowing is the easy part; the rest is what this test looks for.
What is mobile-first indexing and does it still matter?
Google finished moving every site to mobile-first indexing in 2023, which means the mobile version of your page is the version that gets crawled, indexed and ranked. If your mobile page hides content the desktop one shows, that content effectively does not exist as far as Search is concerned. This trips up older sites that were built desktop-first and had mobile bolted on afterwards, where the mobile template drops whole sections to keep the page short.
How do I read this result?
Anything marked as needing fixing is costing you visitors on a phone right now, today. Warnings are working but sloppy, and are typically a small CSS change. One caveat we will be plain about: we read your markup and declared CSS as a phone receives them, but we do not render the page in a browser, so we cannot measure the on-screen size of a button, and we cannot see a layout that only breaks once JavaScript has run. A clean result means nothing in your code is obviously hostile to a phone. It is not a substitute for picking up a phone and using your own site.
What a phone actually needs
The numbers behind each check, and where they come from.
| Signal | The threshold | Why that number |
|---|---|---|
| Viewport | width=device-width, initial-scale=1 | Without it phones assume a 980px desktop canvas |
| Layout width | Nothing pinned above 430px | The widest common phone viewport is around 430px |
| Body text | 16px, never below 12px | Reading distance on a phone is shorter and less stable |
| Form fields | 16px minimum | Below it, iOS Safari zooms the page in on focus |
| Tap targets | 44 x 44px with 8px between | Apple and Google both publish this as the minimum |
| Pinch zoom | Never disabled | Also a WCAG 2.2 AA failure under 1.4.4 |
| HTML weight | Under 100 KB | Around half a second on a busy 4G connection |
How to fix a site that fails on mobile
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1
Run the test above
Start with your home page, then your most-visited service page and your contact page. They usually fail differently.
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2
Fix the viewport tag first
Nothing else matters until the page lays out at device width. One line in the head of every page.
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3
Hunt down the fixed widths
Search your CSS for pixel widths above 430 and replace them with max-width. Tables and old embeds are the usual culprits.
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4
Set form fields to 16px
Fifteen seconds of work that stops iPhones zooming into your enquiry form and stranding people there.
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5
Make images fluid, then make them smaller
max-width:100% stops the overflow. srcset stops phones downloading the desktop file.
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6
Use your own site on your own phone
Book the appointment, fill in the form, find the phone number. Every automated test in the world is a poor substitute for two minutes of this.
Fair questions.
Is the Google Mobile-Friendly Test really gone?
Yes. Google deprecated it in December 2023 along with the mobile usability report in Search Console and the mobile-friendly testing API. The URLs no longer work. Google's position is that mobile-friendliness is now table stakes rather than something needing its own tool, which is true in aggregate and no help at all when you want to check one page.
Does this affect my Google rankings?
Indirectly but genuinely. There is no separate "mobile-friendly ranking factor" you can point at any more, because Google now indexes and ranks the mobile version of your page by default. So mobile problems do not knock points off a score, they change what Google sees of your site in the first place. A page that is hard to use also loses people, and that shows up in the behavioural signals underneath everything.
My site is on Wix or Squarespace. Can it still fail?
Yes, most often on custom code blocks, embedded booking widgets, pasted HTML tables and images uploaded at their original size. The template itself is usually responsive; what people add to it frequently is not.
Why does it say my images are fine when they take forever to load?
Different question. This test checks whether images can shrink to fit the screen and whether you serve phone-sized files. It does not download every image to weigh it, because that would mean dozens of requests per test. For actual load time, run our website speed test, which measures page weight and Core Web Vitals signals directly.
What is the form field zoom thing?
Safari on iPhone zooms the whole page in whenever you focus a text field with a font size below 16px, so the text is readable while typing. It does not zoom back out afterwards. The visitor is left on a page that is suddenly too wide, mid-way through your enquiry form. Setting inputs to 16px is the only reliable fix and it costs nothing.
Can I test a page that is not my home page?
Yes, paste any URL. Deep pages are often worse than the home page, because the home page gets the attention and the service pages get the leftover template.
Do I need a separate mobile site?
No, and if you have one it is holding you back. Separate m-dot sites were a 2012 answer to a 2012 problem. Google indexes the mobile version, so a thinner m-dot site caps what your whole domain can rank for. One responsive site serving the same markup to everyone is the modern approach and has been for a decade.
Is this free, and do you store my URL?
Free, no signup, no limit worth mentioning. We fetch the page once, run the checks in memory and return the result. The URL is not stored, and there is no report held back behind an email form.
Your tired website rebuilt on modern foundations in three weeks, with the rankings you already own protected.