Your website is a phone screen, whether you designed it that way or not
Most people will never see your site on a laptop. Check it on the device they actually hold.
Ofcom measures what UK adults do online using a metered panel rather than asking people to remember. Their latest figures put smartphones at roughly three quarters of all time spent online.
of UK online time was on a smartphone in May 2025 (75% for men, 79% for women), up from 75% a year earlier.
Ofcom, Online Nation 2025, measured by Ipsos iris, UK internet users aged 18+.For a local service business the share is probably higher still, because the moment someone needs you is rarely a moment they are sat at a desk. The boiler goes. The car gets keyed. They are standing in the kitchen with a phone in their hand.
Five things to check right now, on your own phone
Open your site on your phone, on mobile data rather than your own wifi, and work through these.
- Can you read it without pinching. If you have to zoom in to read body text, so does everybody else, and most of them will not bother.
- Is your phone number tappable. It should dial when tapped, not need copying out. Same for your email and your WhatsApp.
- How far down is the first way to contact you. Count the swipes. Two is fine. Six is a problem.
- Does anything run off the side. Swipe left and right. If the page slides sideways, something is too wide, and it usually looks broken rather than clever.
- How long until you can see something useful. Count it out loud. If you get past four, you have lost people who are less patient than you are about your own business.
The bit people get wrong
Phone first does not mean a shrunken version of a desktop page. It means deciding what matters and putting it at the top, because on a phone there is no sidebar, no hover, and no "see the whole layout at a glance".
On a laptop your visitor sees the whole page. On a phone they see about a postcard at a time, and they only get one postcard before deciding whether to stay.
So the first postcard has to carry: who you are, the job you do, where you do it, and a way to contact you. Not a slideshow. Not a welcome message. The rest of the page can take its time once that is settled.
One easy win most sites miss
Buttons that are big enough to hit with a thumb while walking. A link that works perfectly with a mouse can be genuinely difficult on a phone held in one hand. Make the tap targets obviously finger sized and put space around them, so nobody rings you by accident and nobody misses the button they wanted.