Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly? A 12-Point Checklist

Most visitors in Egypt and the Gulf open websites on their phones. If your site is hard to use on mobile, visitors leave without contacting you. You can run this check yourself in ten minutes, no technical skills needed.

Tests you can run yourself

1. Open your site on your phone (not your computer) and go through the main pages.
2. Make sure the page doesn't move sideways. A healthy site needs no horizontal scrolling.
3. Tap every button and link with your thumb. Can you hit the right one without hitting its neighbor?
4. Fill in the contact form completely. Does the number pad appear for the phone field and the email keyboard for email?
5. Rotate the phone and confirm the page adapts.
6. Try the site on a weak connection or with Wi-Fi off. Does the important content appear quickly?

Technical checklist (for the developer, or to review)

• A viewport meta tag so the page isn't shown as a shrunken desktop layout.
• Text size: body text at least 16px so visitors don't need to zoom.
• Touch targets: buttons and links comfortably sized (around 48px is recommended) with space between them.
• Images scale to the screen width and have a mobile-appropriate file size.
• Navigation: a compact menu (hamburger) that's easy to open and close.
• No hover-only content: nothing that only appears on mouse-over.
• Contrast: text is clear against the background, even in sunlight.
• Videos and iframes never exceed the screen width.

Common mistakes on Arabic sites

• The page doesn't fully switch to RTL (menus, buttons and icons still pointing left).
• Small Arabic text or a font that's hard to read.
• Numbers and English words mixed into Arabic sentences and shown in the wrong order.
• Images containing Arabic text that shrink to unreadable on mobile.
• Buttons crowded together in full-width rows.

Tools that help

• Device mode in Chrome DevTools: simulates different phone screens from your computer.
• Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights: a mobile score plus performance and accessibility notes.
• A real Android and iPhone if possible. Nothing replaces real use.
• Note: Google has announced it retired the Mobile-Friendly Test tool and the Mobile Usability report in Search Console, so rely on Lighthouse and your own testing.

WhatsApp and call buttons on mobile

For service businesses, a large, fixed, easy-to-tap WhatsApp button often gets more contacts than a long form. Make sure it doesn't cover important content and that its default message is useful.