Mobile Friendly Test for Your Website: What to Check

What a mobile friendly test looks at

Most testing tools load a page the way a mobile crawler would, show a screenshot and list any issues they find. Yandex Webmaster has such a check built in. Google retired its standalone test, so for Google you rely on Lighthouse and Chrome developer tools instead. The basic signals are similar everywhere:

• a viewport meta tag that fits the page width to the screen;
• content that fits without sideways scrolling;
• text large enough to read without zooming;
• no elements that fail on mobile devices;
• a screenshot that shows what the crawler really saw.

How to run the check properly

Enter the full page address, wait for the result and look at the screenshot before the list of warnings. A picture shows the scale of a problem faster than a line of text.

Do not stop at the homepage. It is usually the most polished page, while service pages, product cards, blog posts and contacts are built from other templates. Test one page of each type, plus anything unusual such as calculators, price tables or promo landing pages.

Reading the screenshot

The screenshot shows what the crawler saw, not what you see on your own phone. Check whether styles and images loaded or the page looks like bare text. Look for a pop-up covering the content, and make sure the headline, the offer and the contact button are visible.

If the page looks broken in the test but fine on your phone, the crawler probably cannot reach some files. Styles or scripts may be blocked in robots.txt or by server protection. Fixing that matters, because search engines then judge a different page from the one people see.

Common problems and fixes

Most warnings come down to a few causes, and a template edit usually solves them.

• Missing viewport: the phone shows a shrunken desktop page. One line in the template fixes it.
• Content wider than the screen: usual culprits are tables, fixed-width images, long unbroken links, embedded maps and videos.
• Tiny text: font sizes made for a monitor. Use responsive sizes in your styles.
• Tap targets too close: menu items and buttons packed so tightly that a finger hits the wrong one.
• A separate mobile site on a subdomain: an outdated setup that means maintaining two copies. A responsive design is simpler and safer.

Why a passing result is not enough

A test confirms the technical minimum. A page can pass and still be frustrating: slow to load, opening with a huge slider, asking for ten form fields, or showing a phone number you cannot tap to call. No tool will judge that, because none of them tries to complete your goal.

So take an ordinary phone, switch off Wi-Fi and open the page on mobile data. Try to submit a request, call, or message the business in Telegram. If you stumble, your customer will too.

Manual checklist for a real phone

Go through it on two devices if you can: a recent one and a modest model, which many of your buyers probably use.

• the menu opens and closes, and every item is visible;
• tapping the phone number starts a call;
• Telegram and other messenger buttons open the right app;
• forms can be filled in and fields do not hide behind the keyboard;
• a payment page with Click or Payme opens without errors;
• pop-ups do not cover the screen and are easy to close;
• images and videos do not stretch the page.

Mobile indexing and when to retest

Google indexes sites mainly by their mobile version. Text, images or markup hidden on the phone may be ignored, so the mobile page should contain the same content as the desktop one and differ only in layout.

Repeat the check after a redesign, whenever you add a new page template, and when Webmaster diagnostics report mobile issues. If you want a site built for phones from the start, or an audit of the pages you already have, markdev develops turnkey websites in Uzbekistan. Send us your task and we will look at it together.