We tested 981 trade business websites on a phone. Here is what we found.

What we counted

We tested home pages only, one visit each, in a headless Chrome set to a 390 pixel wide phone screen. We looked at what a customer sees and downloads on first load. We did not name or rate any business, and this page does not either.

We started with 1,028 sites. We set 47 aside because the page that came back was a bot check or an error page, which tells us nothing about the business. The other 981 are the numbers below. These businesses were found in public directories and matched to their own website by phone number or exact name and city, so the list leans toward businesses that already have a site.

The numbers

Of the 981 sites we could read:

• 394 had at least one of the problems below. That is about 4 in 10.
• 206 home pages downloaded more than 5 MB on a first visit. That is about 1 in 5. The median home page was 2.6 MB. 48 pages were over 10 MB, and the heaviest was 31.9 MB. On about 3 in 4 of those heavy pages the single biggest file was an image. A big page costs a customer on a weak signal time and data before they see your phone number.
• 111 showed a generic or missing title in Google, such as "Home", with no trade or town in it. Google then writes its own title for you.
• 92 showed the phone number as plain text with no tap-to-call link. Many phones fix this on their own, so this one matters less than the others.
• 48 had a footer that says the site was last updated in 2022 or earlier.
• 11 did not fit a phone screen: either they had no mobile setting or the page slid sideways.
• 3 were still showing a placeholder page, and 3 did not load at all on two separate tries.

What we did not measure

We did not time how fast any page loads in seconds. Our test connection is not a customer's phone, so a time would be a guess. Page size is a measurement we can stand behind.

We did not check Google rankings, Google Business Profiles, reviews, or whether anyone is calling. A clean result here does not mean a business is getting calls, and a flagged one may be doing fine. Pages also change, so a site on this list may have been fixed since we looked.

Five checks you can do on your own site in ten minutes

Open your home page on your phone, on mobile data and not on your Wi-Fi, and look at it the way a customer would.

• Can you see your phone number without scrolling, and does tapping it start a call?
• Does the page fit the screen without sliding sideways?
• Search your business name on Google. Does the title say what you do and where?
• Look at the footer. Does the year look current?
• Are your biggest photos resized for the web? A photo straight off a phone can be several MB, and an image was the biggest file on most of the heavy pages we saw.

If you would like us to look at yours

We run this same test on request. It is free, it comes by email, and there is no call. If the site needs more than a fix, a new build is $400, paid half to start and half when it is delivered.