Home Free toolsMobile-friendly test

Website and SEOFree · no sign-upReads live data

Mobile-friendly test: does your website work on a phone?

Type any page address to test it on a phone. Google retired its own Mobile-Friendly Test on 1 December 2023, but it now judges every site by its phone version, so this matters more than it did. We read the page's code and run Google's own phone test through its free PageSpeed Insights service, then show you how the page looks on a phone, whether it passes, what to fix, and how fast it loads.

A pass or fail, with a phone screenshot
Every problem, with the fix
How fast it loads on a phone

1Fill in a few boxes
2See your result straight away
3Unlock the full report, free

Rather have a person look at it? We will go through your numbers with you on a free 30-minute call.

Book a free call

What happened to Google's Mobile-Friendly Test?

Google switched off the Mobile-Friendly Test tool, its API and the Mobile Usability report in Search Console on 1 December 2023. Google pointed site owners to Lighthouse instead, the open-source testing tool built into Chrome.

This test runs Lighthouse for you through Google's free PageSpeed Insights service, on a simulated mid-range phone, and adds our own read of the page's code. You get the same kind of answer the old tool gave, a pass or a fail with a screenshot, plus the reasons and the fixes.

What makes a website mobile-friendly?

Five things decide it, and a page needs all five. Most failures come from one of the first two: a site built before phones mattered, or a theme that was changed by hand.

Google's current testing tool no longer reports every one of them as a separate check, so look at the phone screenshot too: a page that runs off the right-hand edge, or text you have to squint at, shows up there straight away.

What makes a page mobile-friendly, and what failing looks like
Check	What passing means	What a visitor sees when it fails
Set up for phones	A viewport tag with width=device-width	A tiny desktop page they have to pinch to read
Content fits the screen	Nothing wider than the phone	Sideways scrolling, text cut off at the edge
Readable text	Body text 16px, nothing under 12px	Squinting or zooming on every line
Easy to tap	Buttons at least 24 by 24 pixels, spaced apart	Tapping the wrong link, menus that will not open
Zoom allowed	No user-scalable=no in the viewport tag	People who need larger text cannot get it

This test checks set-up for phones, tap targets and zoom every time, and text size when the version of Google's test that runs reports it; content running off the screen shows on the screenshot. 24 by 24 pixels is the WCAG 2.2 minimum; 48 by 48 is more comfortable.

Does a mobile-friendly website help SEO?

Yes. Google crawls and indexes websites as a phone sees them (mobile-first indexing), so the phone version is the version that ranks. Content or links that only appear on the desktop version are, to Google, not there.

Page experience on phones also feeds into how Google judges a page, and a page that is awkward on a phone loses visitors who arrive from search. Being mobile-friendly will not lift a thin page to the top, but failing it holds a good page back.

How fast should a website load on a phone?

Google publishes three Core Web Vitals marks. Speed is reported beside the mobile-friendly verdict rather than inside it, because a page can fit a phone perfectly and still be slow on a phone signal.

Google's Core Web Vitals marks
Measure	What it means	Good	Poor
Largest Contentful Paint	When the main content appears	2.5 seconds or less	Over 4 seconds
Interaction to Next Paint	How quickly a tap gets a response	200 milliseconds or less	Over 500 milliseconds
Cumulative Layout Shift	How much the page jumps while loading	0.1 or less	Over 0.25

Google's published thresholds. The test measures the first and third in a simulated phone; real-visitor figures appear when Google has enough visits to report them.

How do you fix a website that is not mobile-friendly?

Start with the fixes that change the most for the least work. Most sites on WordPress, Squarespace, Wix or Shopify already have a responsive theme, so the problem is usually one plugin, one table or one hand-coded section rather than the whole site.

Add the viewport tag: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">.
Find anything wider than the screen (tables, embeds, fixed-width images) and let it shrink with max-width: 100%.
Set body text to at least 16px and give buttons and menu links room to be tapped.
Remove pop-ups that cover the page on a phone, or make them easy to close.
Compress and resize the largest image, and load it first, to bring the main content in under 2.5 seconds.

How the tool works

Type the address of any page on your site: the home page, a service page or a product.
We read the page as a phone browser asks for it, and Google tests it on a simulated phone (it takes 20 to 40 seconds).
See the verdict and the phone screenshot: mobile-friendly, works with problems, or not mobile-friendly.
See each check in plain words, with the fix for anything that fails, and how fast the page loads on a phone.

How Scale Oxford helps

Website not working on phones? We fix it or rebuild it

Scale Oxford designs and builds websites that work on a phone first, then on a laptop. If your site fails this test, we can usually fix the theme in days; if it is too old to save, we rebuild it with SEO kept intact.

We test every important page on real phones as well as Google's test, and list what fails.
We fix the theme or the pages that break, so you keep your site and your rankings.
Where a rebuild is the better buy, we quote it fixed, keep your addresses and set up redirects.

Book a free call See our web design service

Case study · CroweScale Oxford redesigned the UK website of Crowe, and enquiries from it rose by 189%. Its services were filed under department names, and the contact details sat at the bottom of each page. Each service now has its own page and one clear next step.↑ 189%More enquiries from the website↑ 2.6xHigher conversion rate↓ 79%Faster on mobileRead the case study →

Questions people ask

Did Google remove its Mobile-Friendly Test?

Yes. Google retired the Mobile-Friendly Test, its API and the Mobile Usability report in Search Console on 1 December 2023. It pointed people to Lighthouse instead, which is what this test runs, through Google's PageSpeed Insights service.

How do I check if my website is mobile-friendly?

Type the page address above. The test checks that the page is set up for phones, that buttons and links are easy to tap, that visitors can zoom, that images are sharp and the address is secure, and how fast it loads. It shows a screenshot of the page on a phone, so you can see anything running off the screen, and checks text size whenever Google's test reports it.

Does being mobile-friendly affect Google rankings?

Yes, indirectly and directly. Google reads and ranks sites by their phone version (mobile-first indexing), and page experience on phones is part of how it judges a page. A page that is hard to use on a phone also loses the visitors it does get.

Why does my site pass here but look wrong on my phone?

The test checks one page at one screen size. Other pages, pop-ups that appear after a delay, logged-in areas and very old or very large phones can still behave differently, so test your key pages and open them on a real phone too.

Is there a replacement for Google's Mobile-Friendly Test?

Google recommends Lighthouse, which is built into Chrome's developer tools and runs behind PageSpeed Insights. This test runs it for you and explains the result in plain words, with a screenshot of the page on a phone.

What happened to the Mobile Usability report in Search Console?

It was retired on 1 December 2023, at the same time as the Mobile-Friendly Test. Search Console still shows Core Web Vitals for phones, which covers speed and layout shift but not text size or tap targets.

Why does the test take 20 to 40 seconds?

Google loads the page in a real browser on a simulated phone with a slower connection, waits for it to finish, then measures it. A quick check that only read the code could not see whether the content fits the screen.

Can I test a page that is not my home page?

Yes. Type the full address of any public page, such as a service page or a product. Pages behind a login, or blocked to Google, cannot be tested.

Why is my mobile score different each time?

Speed figures vary from run to run with the network and the server, often by several points. The mobile-friendly checks themselves, such as the viewport tag and text size, stay the same unless the page changes.

What is a viewport meta tag?

A line in the page's head that tells phones to draw the page at the screen's own width instead of a desktop width. Without it, a phone shrinks the whole desktop page to fit, which is the most common reason a site fails.

Does user-scalable=no matter?

Yes. It stops visitors pinching to zoom, which shuts out anyone who needs larger text and fails accessibility guidelines. Remove it, and any maximum-scale below 2, from the viewport tag.

Is a separate mobile site (m.example.co.uk) still a good idea?

Rarely. One responsive site that adapts to every screen is simpler to keep up and avoids content going missing between versions. Google supports separate mobile sites, but asks that they carry the same content as the desktop site.