Why is my site bad on mobile?

Pull up your contractor website on your phone right now. Try to fill out the contact form using only your thumb. Try to read the body text without zooming in. Try to tap your phone number to call yourself. If any of those is annoying, painful, or impossible, your website is broken on mobile, and the data is brutal: roughly 80% of contractor website traffic comes from a phone, and most of those visitors are bouncing within the first 5 seconds.

Mobile is not "the smaller version" of your website. It is the website. Desktop is the rounding error. Yet the typical contractor site we audit was clearly designed on a 27-inch monitor and then "checked" on mobile by squinting at it through a Chrome devtools simulation that looks fine because the developer wasn't actually trying to use it with a thumb.

Here are the six things almost always wrong with contractor sites on mobile, ranked by how much money each one is costing you, and exactly what good looks like.

WiFi makes everything feel fine. Your customer is not on WiFi. They are at home about to hire someone, or worse, they are stuck somewhere and need an emergency plumber. They're on cellular. Your site has roughly 3 seconds to load before more than half of those visitors leave. Most contractor sites we audit load in 6 to 9 seconds on a real cellular connection.

The killers are almost always the same: huge unoptimized hero images, 8 different tracking scripts, a slider plugin loading 12 images they'll never see, and a "free" theme with bloated code. None of these are visible to the owner. All of them are killing your mobile conversion rate.

Apple's recommended tap target is 44x44 pixels. Google says 48x48. Most contractor sites have phone numbers and "Contact" buttons closer to 16 to 20 pixels tall. That means the visitor has to either zoom in or risk tapping the wrong link entirely. Both feel terrible. Both get them out.

Mobile body text should be at least 16 pixels. Ideally 17 or 18. Anything smaller forces the visitor to pinch-zoom, which immediately tells them this site wasn't built for them. Most contractor sites use 14 or 13 pixel body text on mobile because the desktop version "looks fine" at that size.

Same for line height. Cramped lines feel like reading legal disclaimers. Generous spacing, around 1.5 to 1.7x the font size, makes content feel readable instead of dense.

You know what's worse than a 12-field contact form? A 12-field contact form on a phone where each field is too small to tap, the keyboard covers the submit button, and the dropdown menus don't work properly with iOS. Most contractor sites have this exact problem because the form was designed for a mouse, then "made responsive" without actually being tested on a real phone.

Mobile forms need:

• Three fields max for the initial inquiry, period
• Input fields tall enough to tap easily (at least 48px)
• The right keyboard for the right field (numeric keyboard for phone, email keyboard for email)
• A submit button that doesn't get covered by the keyboard
• Real-time validation so the user knows what they did wrong before scrolling all the way down to submit

This is the cheapest, dumbest, most overlooked mobile fix in the entire industry. Your phone number on the page is just text. The customer wants to call you. They have to tap the number, copy it, switch apps to the dialer, paste it, and then call. By the time they're done with that nonsense, half of them have given up and called your competitor who had a tap-to-call link.

Wiring up a phone number for tap-to-call takes one line of HTML. There is no excuse for not doing it. Look at your site on your phone right now. If the number doesn't open the dialer with one tap, you are losing calls every single day.

The iPhone SE is still in the top 5 phones in the US. It has a 4.7-inch screen. If your site only "looks fine" on a Pro Max or a Galaxy Ultra, you have a problem. Common breakage we see on smaller screens: text overflowing buttons, hero images cropping off the most important part, navigation menus collapsing into illegible mush, sticky elements covering the form on submit.

You don't need to test on every phone in existence. You do need to test on at least one small phone (4.7 inch class) and one large phone (6.7 inch class). If you don't have both, Chrome devtools simulates this in 30 seconds, but ideally you grab a real phone of each size and try it for real.

What "good on mobile" actually looks like

A mobile-first contractor website is not a desktop site that "also works" on mobile. It is built phone-first, then expanded to look good on bigger screens. The whole structure, the type sizes, the tap targets, the page weight, all of it is decided based on what works on a 5-inch screen with a thumb on cellular.

Two of our recent builds were both mobile-first by design from day one:

Where to start

If your site has more than two of the six killers above, the underlying foundation is wrong. Mobile-first websites cannot be retrofitted from a desktop-first site without basically rebuilding from scratch. The good news: that's exactly what we do.

If you want to know where you actually stand, request a free mobile audit. We test your site on real iPhones and Androids, score it across all six killers above plus 15 more mobile-specific issues, and send a written report in 24 hours. No pitch, just the data.

If you already know mobile is the problem and you're ready to fix it, head to contractor websites to see what we build, how we build it, and what it costs. Every site we ship is mobile-first by default.

Related: if you're also wondering why your site isn't converting overall, mobile is usually one of the top three reasons. Check both.