Mobile-friendly website checklist

Why the phone version is the real version

Google uses mobile-first indexing: it mainly crawls and judges the phone version of each page. If your phone layout hides your service list, drops the FAQ or shows a cut-down menu, Google may not see that content at all. In India and many other markets, most of your visitors are on phones too, often on mid-range Android handsets and patchy mobile data.

Layout and reading

• The page has a viewport meta tag so it scales to the screen width.
• Nothing makes the page scroll sideways: wide tables, fixed-width images or long unbroken text.
• Body text is around 16 pixels or larger and has good contrast against the background.
• Lines are short enough to read comfortably; paragraphs are short.
• Phone numbers and addresses are text, not part of an image.

Tapping and typing

• Buttons and links are large enough to tap with a thumb, roughly 48 by 48 pixels, with space between them.
• The main action, such as Call, WhatsApp or Book, is easy to reach without hunting.
• Phone numbers use a tel: link so one tap starts a call.
• Forms are short, use the right keyboard for each field (number pad for phone numbers), and labels stay visible while typing.
• Menus open and close easily and do not trap the visitor.

Pop-ups and banners

Full-screen pop-ups that appear as soon as someone lands from Google make the content hard to reach, and Google treats them as a poor experience. Cookie notices and age checks that are legally needed are fine. For offers, use a small banner or show the offer after the visitor has scrolled, and make the close button easy to tap.

Speed on a real phone

• Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less on phone.
• Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, so taps feel immediate.
• Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, so buttons do not move under a thumb.
• Images sized for phones, not shipped at full camera size.

Same content, same signals

• The phone version has the same main text, headings and images as the computer version.
• Titles, meta descriptions, structured data and canonical tags are the same on both.
• Images have alt text on the phone layout too.
• Nothing important is hidden behind tabs that never load on mobile.

How to test, and where AI Marketing Master fits

Google retired its standalone Mobile-Friendly Test in late 2023, so test with PageSpeed Insights on the phone setting and by using the site on an actual budget phone. AI Marketing Master's audit includes basic mobile checks and shows Core Web Vitals for phone and computer separately, so you can see when the phone experience lags behind. The app itself is built mobile-first, so you can run your checks and approve fixes from your phone.