Most of your customers are on a phone. Is your site ready?

If you run a local business in Western Sydney, there's a good chance most of the people looking at your website right now are doing it on a phone. Not at a desk, not on a laptop — on a phone, possibly while sitting in their car between jobs, or during their lunch break, or on the train home.

Google's own data consistently shows that more than 60% of searches happen on mobile devices — and for local, service-based searches ('electrician near me', 'migration agent Bankstown'), that number is even higher. The people most likely to call you are searching on their phone.

The three-second test

Pull up your website on your phone right now. Not on your laptop, not in a desktop browser — on your actual phone, on your normal internet connection. Then ask three questions:

• Did the page load in under three seconds? If you're still staring at a blank screen at three seconds, so are your customers — and most of them have already hit the back button.
• Can you read the text without pinching to zoom? If you have to zoom in to read a paragraph, the font is too small. For body text, 16px is the minimum on mobile.
• Is there a tap-to-call button visible without scrolling? For most local businesses, a phone call is the primary conversion. If your number requires five taps to reach, that's five opportunities to lose someone.

What mobile-first actually means

Mobile-first isn't just about making a desktop site smaller. It's about designing with the mobile experience as the primary experience, and then enhancing it for larger screens.

In practice, this means: layouts that work in a single column, touch targets that are at least 44px tall (fingers are not cursors), images that load quickly on a 4G connection, and navigation that doesn't require a mouse hover to operate.

It also means thinking about context. A mobile visitor looking for a plumber at 7pm is probably stressed about a leak. They need your number and service area, fast. They don't need to scroll past a three-paragraph origin story before they find a contact button.

Common mobile problems I see on local business sites

• Horizontal scrolling — the page is wider than the screen. Almost always caused by an image or element with a fixed pixel width that overflows on small screens.
• Text that overlaps or gets cut off when the screen is smaller than the designer expected.
• Buttons that are too small to tap reliably, especially navigation links in a cramped header.
• A hamburger menu that's hard to find, slow to open, or disappears behind other elements.
• Forms where the keyboard covers the input fields — the user is filling in the form but can't see what they're typing.
• Images so large they slow the page to a crawl on mobile data — a 4MB PNG that looks fine on fibre feels like dial-up on 4G.

How to check your mobile performance

Google PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) gives you a free score and a list of specific issues to fix. Run it on your homepage and your most important service page. Anything below 70 on the mobile score is a problem worth addressing.

Google uses mobile page experience as a ranking factor. A slow, hard-to-use mobile site doesn't just frustrate visitors — it actively suppresses how often you appear in search results.