A separate m. site that drops pages and sends every phone visitor to its home page tells people the firm does not offer what they searched for. One responsive site, at one address, fixes it.

The site

An accounting firm with three partners and about a dozen staff, in a suburban office building: personal tax returns, bookkeeping and year-ends for small companies, and estate returns.

On a computer the site has about twenty pages: one for each service, fees for personal returns, the team, a document checklist for tax season, a link to a secure portal for uploading documents, and an archive of newsletters.

On a phone, every visitor is sent to a separate address beginning with m., built six years ago when phone sites were usually kept apart from the main one. It has five pages: home, about, services, contact and a map.

The services page is one paragraph long. The mobile home page still announces last spring's extended tax season hours.

The inference a visitor makes

The owner of a small company searches on a phone for an accountant to handle a corporate year-end, sees the firm's corporate tax page in the results and taps it.

That page never appears. The phone lands on the mobile home page instead: a welcome line, a phone number, last spring's hours, and a list of services that never mentions corporate work.

The visitor concludes that the firm does not do corporate work, or that the site is broken. Either way, the next result is one tap away.

For an accountant, attention to detail is the product. A site that loses the page you asked for invites the thought that the firm might lose your paperwork too.

Every link lands on the home page

The cause is the redirect. When the site detects a phone, it sends the visitor to the m. home page, whatever page they asked for.

Google calls this a faulty redirect and lists it among the common mistakes on separate mobile sites. It has said that sites with such errors may rank lower in searches made on phones.

The damage reaches beyond search. Links in the firm's newsletters, links clients forward to each other and links from directories all end on the same home page when opened on a phone.

What the phone site leaves out

The fourth will cost the firm most in the months ahead. Clients photograph slips and receipts on their phones, cannot find the portal there, and send them as ordinary email attachments instead.

That is personal financial information travelling the least careful way, because the careful way was missing from the version of the site they used.

Two sites to keep current

Every change has to be made twice, and here the phone version runs on a separate system that the office cannot edit. Changes wait for someone to remember the second login.

So the phone site drifts. Hours, staff and services fall behind the main site, and the visitors most likely to be in a hurry see the oldest information.

Tax season makes it worse. Hours, deadlines and the document checklist change every year, and they are exactly the details a client checks on a phone.

Links that break the other way

A client on a phone copies the m. address of a page and emails it to a business partner, who opens it on a laptop and gets the cut-down phone site stretched across a wide screen.

Tablets get one version or the other depending on how the detection script reads them, and newer devices are sometimes misread entirely.

Phone visitors nobody counts

The m. site was given its own analytics code when it was built, and nobody has opened that account since. The firm's reports cover visits to the main site only.

So the partners cannot see how many prospective clients arrive on phones, which pages they asked for, or how many leave the mobile home page within seconds.

A problem that never shows up in the figures is easy to rate as minor.

What search engines see

Separate mobile sites need paired annotations in the code, so that each main page points to its phone twin and each phone page points back. Here, fifteen of the twenty pages have no twin to point to.

Google has also said it is experimenting with ranking pages on what their phone versions contain. For this firm, that means five thin pages.

A worked example

The office manager noticed in October, when a client said she had looked everywhere on her phone for the upload link and finally emailed her slips instead.

The partners asked their web company for options. Fixing the m. site would have meant building fifteen more pages on a system nobody in the office could edit, and keeping both versions in step from then on.

Instead the main site was rebuilt as one responsive site: one address for every page, with a layout that rearranges itself to suit the screen. Long service pages were rewritten to read well in a narrow column.

The portal link now sits in the header of every page on every screen, and the phone number can be tapped to call.

Each old m. address now redirects permanently to its matching page on the main site, and the links in email signatures and the newsletter template were changed to match.

The mobile site subscription was cancelled once every redirect had been tested.

The counter-case within the site

Some separate mobile sites are built properly: every page has a phone twin, every redirect goes to the matching page, and both versions are edited in one place. Those are not an emergency.

A large site may also reasonably move to responsive design in stages, starting with the pages people reach most often from search.

But a phone site with a quarter of the pages, and a redirect that throws away the page asked for, costs the firm every time it is used. One site at one address is the fix.

What to change

  1. Open five search results on a phone.
  2. List the pages the phone site lacks.
  3. Put the portal link on every page.
  4. Rebuild as one responsive site.
  5. Redirect each m. address to its matching page.
  6. Update links in signatures and newsletters.
  7. Cancel the mobile service once redirects work.

Step five keeps the move from repeating the original mistake. Old addresses that lead to the pages they stood for keep every saved link working; old addresses sent to the home page change nothing.

Another way a site spends a visitor's trust in the first few seconds is described in a florist site still showing Valentine's Day in October.

Frequently asked questions

What is a separate mobile site?

A second, cut-down version of a website at its own address, often beginning with m., to which phone visitors are sent automatically. Many were built before responsive design was common.

Why do phone visitors land on the home page?

Because the redirect sends every phone to the mobile home page, whatever page was asked for. Google calls this a faulty redirect and lists it as a common mistake.

What does a visitor conclude from it?

That the firm does not offer what they searched for, or that the site is broken. For an accountant, it also suggests a firm that might lose paperwork.

Is a separate mobile site bad for search?

It can be. Each page needs a paired phone version and correct annotations, and Google is experimenting with ranking pages by their phone versions, which here are thin.

What should replace the m. address?

One responsive site: every page at one address, with a layout that adapts to the screen, so phones and computers get the same content.

What happens to links to old m. pages?

Each should redirect permanently to its matching page on the main site. Sending them all to the home page would simply repeat the original problem.

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.

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