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Free tool / Phone check

Free Mobile-Friendly Test

Google retired its Mobile-Friendly Test on December 1, 2023. This test checks the same problems at phone width and adds speed and crawl checks.

Free. No sign-up. Up to 10 tests an hour.

What it checks

  1. Viewport

    The phone uses its own width

  2. Fits the screen

    Nothing wider than the screen

  3. Readable text

    Text 12 px or larger

  4. Tap targets

    Room for a fingertip

  5. Speed on a phone

    Google’s lab test

  6. Can Google crawl it

    robots.txt and noindex

Phone width, 375 px

What each check looks for

  • Viewport

    A one-line tag in the page head tells a phone to lay the page out at its own width. Without it, the phone draws a desktop page about 980 px wide and shrinks it to fit, so everything gets small. The fix is that one line: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">.

  • Fits the screen

    Nothing on the page should be wider than the phone. A fixed-width table, a large image or an embed pushes the whole page sideways, and visitors have to scroll left and right to read it. Let tables scroll inside their own box, give images max-width: 100%, and swap fixed widths for flexible ones.

  • Readable text

    Text under 12 px is hard to read without zooming in. It usually hides in menus, captions, fine print and footers. Keep body text at 16 px and everything else at 12 px or more.

  • Tap targets

    Google recommends tap targets of about 48 by 48 px. When links are smaller than that and close together, people tap the wrong one. Add padding to small links and buttons, or more space between them.

  • Speed on a phone

    Google’s PageSpeed Insights loads the page on a simulated mid-range phone. Largest paint is when the main content appears, layout shift is how much the page jumps while it loads, and blocking time is how long it is too busy to respond. When Google has data from real Chrome visits, you see interaction time from those visits too.

  • Can Google crawl it

    A page can work well on a phone and still be missing from search. The test reads the site’s robots.txt the way Googlebot does, then checks the page for a noindex tag or header. If either one blocks Google, fix that first.

Questions about the test

What happened to Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test?
Google retired the Mobile-Friendly Test, its API and the Mobile Usability report in Search Console on December 1, 2023, and pointed site owners to Lighthouse in Chrome. This page checks the same problems in one place, with the results drawn on a screenshot of your page.
Does it check the same things as Google’s old test?
Yes: a missing viewport, content wider than the screen, small text and links that are too close together. The pass marks are our own, set out in the check descriptions above, so a borderline page can pass here and get a warning elsewhere.
Does mobile-friendliness matter for Google?
Google indexes the mobile version of a page. If text is hard to read, content runs off the screen or links are hard to tap on a phone, that is the version Google sees and the version most visitors use.
Why do the speed numbers change between tests?
Google runs a fresh lab test each time, and server and network timing vary from run to run. Compare a few runs, and use the phone checks above for layout problems, which stay the same.
Does it test my whole website?
One page per test. Start with your homepage, then test the pages people land on most, such as your main service pages and your contact page. To check up to 25 pages for SEO problems at once, use the Free SEO Audit.
What does the test keep?
The result and screenshot are kept for 10 minutes so a shared result link opens straight away, then they are deleted. There is no account and no email.

Built by Jardine Studio, a Toronto web development studio. If the fixes need a developer, get in touch.