A Site With No Mobile Version at All

The site

A family-run supplier, trading for thirty years, with a site built around 2011.

It works perfectly on a desktop: clear structure, real information, and prices.

On a phone it appears as the full desktop page reduced until the text is unreadable, requiring pinching for every paragraph.

The telephone number is an image, so it cannot be tapped or copied.

The inference a visitor makes

• Are they still trading.
• This is going to be work.
• I cannot read the prices.
• I cannot tap the number.
• Try somebody else.

The first is the unfair one and it is the one that happens. A site that looks like this reads as abandoned, and a thirty-year-old business with a full order book is being assessed as though it had closed.

The arithmetic is the argument

Which is worth putting plainly to whoever is deciding.

Look at the device split in your own analytics for the last twelve months.

For most local businesses it is between two thirds and four fifths on phones.

So the site works properly for a minority of visitors and badly for everybody else.

Framed that way, the question is not whether to spend money on a mobile version but why the majority experience has been the neglected one for a decade.

That figure is available today and it usually ends the discussion.

Patching does not work here

Which is the honest technical answer.

A site built with fixed widths cannot be made to reflow by adding something, because the layout is constructed from assumptions that do not hold at narrow sizes.

The separate mobile site that used to be the answer creates two sites to maintain, which within a year means one is out of date.

And an automatic converter produces something that technically fits and reads as a poor imitation of the real site.

So the honest advice is a rebuild, which is unwelcome and is cheaper than three years of losing the majority of visitors.

A rebuild of a site this size is measured in weeks rather than months.

A worked example

The supplier rebuilt on an ordinary modern template, carrying across the same text, the same prices, and the same structure.

They changed nothing about what the site said.

Enquiries roughly tripled over the following six months, entirely from phones.

Their desktop traffic and desktop enquiries were unchanged, which confirmed nothing had been lost.

The content had been fine for a decade and had been unreadable to most of the people looking at it.

The rebuild cost less than the enquiries produced in the first quarter.

Keep the content, replace the container

Which is what makes this cheaper than it sounds.

A thirty-year-old business has real information on its site: specifications, prices, terms, and answers written by somebody who knows the trade.

That material is the expensive part and it already exists.

A rebuild that carries it across and puts it in a layout that works is a fraction of the cost of a project that also rewrites everything.

Resist the suggestion to modernise the copy at the same time, since that is where these projects expand and stall.

Move it, then improve it later.

Two things to fix in the meantime

Since a rebuild takes weeks and the site is losing people today.

Replace the telephone number image with real text that dials when tapped, which can be done to almost any site in an afternoon.

And check the local listing carries the current hours, address, and number, since that is where most phone visitors are actually looking.

Those two changes cost almost nothing and recover a share of what the layout is losing.

They are not a substitute for the rebuild and they are worth doing this week.

Search treats this as a problem too

Which is the secondary cost.

Search engines have assessed pages on their mobile version for years now, so the version being judged is the unreadable one.

That affects visibility for exactly the local searches this business should win.

So the site is both losing the people who arrive and reducing the number who arrive at all.

Those two effects compound, which is why the decline in enquiries from a site like this is gradual rather than sudden.

Ask what the last quote was for

Which is worth doing before commissioning anything, because these businesses have usually been quoted before.

A supplier of thirty years has almost certainly had a proposal for a new site at some point and declined it, and the reason is usually that the quote covered a great deal more than a working layout.

Ask for a quote scoped specifically as carrying the existing content into a responsive template, with no new copy, no new photography, and no strategy work.

That is a materially smaller number than a full redesign and it is the version that solves the actual problem.

Everything else can be considered next year, once the majority of visitors can read the site.

The counter-case within the site

The content is genuinely good.

Prices are published, the terms are clear, the delivery information is specific, and somebody has answered real questions properly.

It is better written than most sites built last year, which is why the rebuild should preserve it rather than start again.

And a business whose customers order by telephone from a printed catalogue may genuinely have little at stake.

Check the device split before accepting that, since the assumption is wrong far more often than it is right.

Even a trade counter business finds most of its lookups now happen on a phone, in a truck, before somebody drives over.

That is precisely the visitor this layout serves worst.

What to change

1. Check the device split.
2. Make the number tappable this week.
3. Update the local listing.
4. Plan a rebuild, not a patch.
5. Carry the content across unchanged.
6. Resist rewriting at the same time.
7. Compare enquiries after six months.

Step one is the number that makes the decision, since a business seeing four fifths of its visitors on phones is not choosing whether to build a mobile version but whether to keep serving most people badly.

The restaurant version of this is covered in a restaurant site you cannot read on a phone.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.