Technically responsive, still broken on a phone
Almost every site built in the last decade is responsive. Plenty of them are still miserable on a phone — text that needs pinching, buttons too close to tap, a table that scrolls the whole page sideways. This page is about fixing that on a site you already have, not rebuilding it.
What we actually fix
Horizontal scroll
One over-wide element drags the entire page sideways. Usually a table, an embed or a fixed pixel width buried in a stylesheet. We find it rather than guess.
Tap targets and spacing
Links stacked too close to hit reliably, menus that need precision, buttons at the very edge of the screen where a thumb can’t reach.
Type that needs pinching
Body text under 16px, line lengths that run off the screen, and headings scaled from a desktop design without a mobile step.
Forms people abandon
Wrong keyboard for the field, labels that vanish, a submit button below three screens of inputs. Forms are where mobile conversion is usually lost.
Mobile Core Web Vitals
Measured on a phone on a real connection, not on your desktop. The numbers are routinely much worse, and the mobile ones are the ones that count.
Sticky things eating the screen
A fixed header, a cookie bar and a chat bubble can take half a small viewport between them before any content shows.
Google reads the mobile version
This is the part that catches people out. Google indexes the mobile rendering of your site, not the desktop one. So anything your theme hides on small screens has a real chance of not being indexed at all.
- Content hidden on mobile. Some themes drop whole sections at small widths to simplify the layout. If Google only reads the mobile version, that content may as well not exist.
- Different headings on mobile. A separate mobile menu or hero with different text means the page Google sees isn’t the page you reviewed.
- Images and structured data omitted from the mobile template, which quietly removes rich result eligibility.
We check what the mobile rendering actually contains, which is a different question from whether it looks right. Finding content missing from the mobile version is one of the more common things an audit turns up.
The conversion gap
Pull your analytics and split conversion rate by device. On most sites the mobile figure is dramatically worse while mobile carries most of the traffic. That gap is usually the single largest fixable number on the site.
It’s rarely one dramatic fault. It’s an accumulation:
- A form that takes four screens instead of one
- A price or phone number that needs zooming to read
- A hero image pushing everything below the fold
- A popup that can’t be dismissed with one thumb
- Checkout steps that work on desktop and fight you on a phone
Each costs a small percentage. Together they’re the gap. More under conversion rate optimization.
Retrofit or rebuild
Worth being straight about, because a retrofit is far cheaper and we’d rather sell you the cheaper thing when it’s the right one.
Retrofit is right when
- The desktop site works and looks current
- The theme is actively maintained
- The problems are layout and spacing rather than structure
- Content is in the editor, not locked inside builder shortcodes
Rebuild is right when
- The theme is abandoned or unmaintained
- There’s a separate mobile theme or an m-dot domain
- Mobile page weight is several megabytes before images
- Every fix breaks something else — a sign the CSS has been patched for years
We’ll tell you which you have after looking, and we’ll say “retrofit” when retrofit is enough. If it’s a rebuild, that’s WordPress development or a custom theme.
Common questions
Our site passes Google’s mobile test. Isn’t that enough?
No. Those checks catch the basics — viewport set, text not microscopic, tap targets not overlapping. A site can pass every one of them and still be unpleasant to use, and passing says nothing about your mobile conversion rate or your mobile Core Web Vitals.
Do you test on real devices?
Yes, and it matters. Browser device emulation misses the things that actually hurt: touch accuracy, scroll behaviour, how the on-screen keyboard shifts the layout, and how the page feels on a mid-range phone rather than a fast one.
How long does a retrofit take?
It depends on how the CSS was written, not how many pages you have. A theme with clean breakpoints takes days. A theme that’s been patched by four developers over six years takes longer, and the audit tells us which you have before we quote.
Will this change how the desktop site looks?
Not unless you want it to. Mobile-only fixes are scoped to small breakpoints, and we test desktop afterwards to confirm nothing moved.
Can you fix the mobile speed too?
That’s usually the same project. Mobile performance and mobile layout tend to share causes — oversized images, render-blocking scripts, a slider nobody uses. See search engine optimization for the technical side.
Open your own site on your phone
Try to complete whatever you want visitors to do. Then send us the URL and tell us where it got annoying — that’s usually the whole brief.