Mobile: why 70 % of your customers see a different site
You know your website well. You know where the button is, what the hero section looks like, how fast it loads. The problem is that you see it on a monitor — and most of your customers don’t.
Open it on your phone right now.
The numbers most site owners don’t know
Sixty to seventy per cent of web traffic arrives from mobile devices. In some segments — local services, lifestyle, online platforms — it runs past 80 or 90 per cent.
And yet sites get designed on desktop. Meetings with the designer happen in front of a monitor. The design is approved in a presentation opened in a browser on a laptop. The result: a site optimised for the minority of visitors — and never tested by the rest.
36 seconds
We worked with an online consulting platform. The operator was frustrated by weak interest — traffic wasn’t bad, but people left. Average session length: 36 seconds.
The first instinct was to look for the problem in the product or the offer. The product wasn’t the problem. The problem was what people saw when they arrived.
Ninety per cent of traffic came from phones. The site was built for desktop and fell apart on mobile — a crowded layout, the CTA hidden below the fold, text too small to read. Visitors left not because the product didn’t interest them, but because the site never let them find out what the product was.
A customer who can’t take a step now usually takes none at all.
The most common mobile mistakes
Problems that repeat across sites regardless of industry:
The CTA isn’t visible without scrolling. On desktop the call to action sits in the first view. On mobile it can easily land on the third screen — even though the layout “looks fine”. The visitor leaves before reaching it.
Buttons too small or too close together. Apple recommends a minimum touch target of 44 × 44 px. Below that, buttons become a source of frustration — the customer hits the wrong one, or misses entirely.
Forms not built for a mobile keyboard. A phone field without type="tel" shows the standard keyboard instead of the numeric one. An email field without type="email" hides the @ and .com shortcuts. Small details that add friction to every submission.
Images that load too slowly. On Wi-Fi you don’t notice. On 4G on a moving train it’s a different story. Unoptimised images with no lazy loading and no WebP are one of the most common reasons people abandon a page — before they’ve even started deciding.
Horizontal scroll. One element wider than the screen — an image, a table, a fixed-width block of text — breaks the whole mobile experience. And it’s invisible on desktop.
How to test your mobile site (for free)
Physically. Take a phone — ideally not the newest flagship but an average device — and walk the entire conversion flow. From landing on the page to completing the action. Watch where you hesitate, where you have to zoom, where loading stalls.
Do the same on two different devices. Android and iPhone behave differently, and problems often show up on only one of them.
Google Search Console → Core Web Vitals. The Page Experience section reports separately for desktop and mobile. If the problems appear only in the mobile score, you know where to look. How to work through the results step by step is covered in the article on site speed.
PageSpeed Insights. Enter the URL and switch to the mobile view. A score under 50 on mobile is critical — and it’s not unusual on sites that score above 90 on desktop.
Session recordings. A replay tool shows you literally how a customer moves through your site on a phone — where they stall, where they scroll aimlessly, where they leave. What the numbers only hint at, recordings show directly.
What to fix first
A redesign isn’t the first step. Most of these problems are solved by targeted small changes — faster and cheaper than reworking the whole layout. How to approach fixes systematically is covered in the guide to where to start raising conversions.
1. Make the CTA visible without scrolling. Check whether the main call to action is in the first view on mobile. If it isn’t, that’s your first fix — and it’s usually one line of CSS.
2. Compress images. The biggest impact for the least technical effort. Converting to WebP and serving correct dimensions typically cuts 30–50 % of page weight. The result is immediately measurable in load time.
3. Give forms the right attributes. Adding type="email" and type="tel" is a one-line change. Every customer filling the form on a phone will feel it.
4. Verify touch targets. Go through every button and interactive element. Are they big enough? Is there enough space around them to hit without zooming?
Only if these changes aren’t enough — or if recordings reveal a deeper structural problem — does reworking the layout make sense. And be careful: a redesign on its own doesn’t do it — without data and testing with real users, a new design won’t raise conversions.
The takeaway
Customers arrive at your site with a phone in hand. What you see on a monitor is a different website — better loaded, better laid out, easier to operate.
Five minutes with a phone can surface problems analytics has been missing for months.
If you don’t know where customers leave your site and why, the most common conversion mistakes are the fastest place to start. Go through the site systematically — mobile view included — and turn every finding into a concrete recommendation with a measurable hypothesis.