Guide · Mobile
Why 8% of them
fail on a phone.
We requested every website attached to a GTA business listing — 34,180 of them. 2,788 fail a visitor on a phone. Most of those fail in the least obvious way: the listing points to a site that does not load at all. The rest load, but only as a desktop page shrunk to fit.
Published 2026-09-08 · updated 2026-09-21 · Formory Group
Two different failures.
2,162 of the sites we requested did not load at all or showed a for-sale or “coming soon” page. The Google listing still links to them, so a customer who taps "Website" on their phone lands on an error. That is the larger problem by far, and the owner usually has no idea, because they never open their own site from their own listing.
The other 626 loaded fine but had no mobile layout at all. Of the 27,080 sites that did load, that is 2% — a small share, and falling every year, but concentrated in sites built before 2015 that nobody has touched since.
What "no mobile version" actually looks like.
It is not that the site looks slightly cramped. A desktop-only page loaded on a phone renders at about a third of its intended size: the text is illegible, the navigation is unusable without pinching, and the phone number is too small to tap. The visitor's options are to zoom around hunting for a phone number, or to press back and open the next listing. Most press back.
Nothing warns the owner. The owner looks at the site on the desktop where it was built, sees it working, and reasonably concludes it is fine.
What a dead link on your listing costs.
A listing that links to a broken site is worse than a listing with no website at all. With no link, the customer calls. With a dead one, they tap, hit an error, and quietly conclude the business may have closed. The fix is free and takes two minutes: open your Google Business Profile, check the website field, and either repair the site or remove the link until you have one.
Why it matters more than it used to.
Google's primary crawler has been the smartphone one for years, so the mobile version of your page is the version being indexed and judged. A page with no mobile layout is not disqualified from ranking, but it is competing on the version of itself that is hardest to read.
The commercial effect is more direct than the ranking effect. Somebody searching for a plumber is usually standing next to the problem, holding a phone. The website that answers on that phone gets the call.
How to check yours in ten seconds.
Open your site on your own phone, on mobile data rather than the office wifi. Do not zoom. Can you read the first paragraph? Can you tap the phone number without aiming? Is the main thing you do visible before you scroll? Three noes and you have found your problem.
Or use our free check, which loads the page at phone width and tells you what it finds — including when the answer is that nothing is wrong.
What fixing it involves.
If the site is on a maintained platform with a modern theme, this is a theme change and costs very little. If it is one of the 69 sites we found still running on software that has been discontinued for years, there is nothing to switch on — the page has to be rebuilt, and the honest quote reflects that.
The middle case is the common one: a site built between 2010 and 2015 on a platform that still exists, where a responsive layout is technically possible but the page structure fights it. That is usually the point where rebuilding costs less than repairing.
Questions
Asked often.
My site works on my phone. Am I fine?
Probably, but check on a second device and on mobile data. Cached pages and desktop-class tablets hide problems that a first-time visitor on a slow connection will meet immediately.
Is a separate mobile site (m.example.com) still acceptable?
It works, but it doubles the maintenance and the two versions drift apart. One responsive site is simpler and is what Google expects.
How much does a mobile fix cost?
A theme swap on a maintained platform is an afternoon. A rebuild starts at $590 for a single-page business. The variable is what the current site is built on, which is why we look before quoting.
Before you decide anything
Find out whether
you have a problem.
Most people asking about a rebuild do not need one. The free check opens your site, looks at how it behaves on a phone, whether it is secure and how old the page is, and tells you which of those apply to you.
Think yours needs
rebuilding?
Send us the address and what you do. We will look at what is there and tell you whether a rebuild is worth the money, or whether the problem is somewhere else entirely.