Mobile-Friendly Test

A mobile-friendly page can be read and used on a phone without zooming, pinching or scrolling sideways. People look up hours, directions and phone numbers on their phones, often ready to buy, and a hard-to-use page sends them to the next result.

Google retired its Mobile-Friendly Test on December 1, 2023 and recommended Lighthouse instead. This test runs Lighthouse through PageSpeed Insights on a simulated phone.

• Mobile viewport: tells the phone to lay the page out at screen width. Without it, phones shrink a desktop page. This one matters most.
• Readable text: at least 16 pixels for body text on phones, nothing under 12. Recent Lighthouse versions skip this audit, so check the screenshot.
• Tap targets: WCAG 2.2 sets a minimum of 24 by 24 pixels. Call and Book buttons deserve more.
• Content width: nothing wider than the screen. Fixed-width images, tables and embeds are the usual culprits.

• Mobile-friendly: the viewport is set and no check failed.
• Works on phones, with fixes needed: the viewport is set, but another check failed.
• Not mobile-friendly: no mobile viewport, so phones show a shrunken desktop page.

When a check cannot run, the test says "not checked" rather than guessing. A page can pass every check and still be slow, so the fixes list adds a speed item when the mobile performance score is under 50.

1. Add the viewport tag: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">, then check the whole page.
2. Let visitors zoom: remove user-scalable=no and maximum-scale=1.
3. Constrain wide elements: give images, videos and embeds max-width: 100%.
4. Raise the base font size to 16 pixels on small screens.
5. Enlarge tap targets with padding and space between links.

A failing test is one of the clearest reasons to offer a new site. The owner can check it on their own phone in seconds. Send the verdict and the screenshot, and point to one problem they will recognize, such as a phone number too small to tap.

Many local businesses have no website at all. SiteSeeker finds them in Google Maps listings by city and category, and can build a mobile-friendly site from a listing.