Mobile website testing
See How Your Website Behaves on a Phone
A site that looks right on your laptop can be hard to use on a phone. Provelex replays your pages at phone screen sizes and measures the failures that reach real visitors, such as content off the side of the screen and buttons too small to tap.
What is checked
| Finding | Why it matters | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|
| The page is not set up for phones | Without a mobile viewport setting, the phone shows a tiny version of the desktop page | The page’s viewport tag |
| Visitors are prevented from zooming in | People who need larger text cannot enlarge it | The page’s viewport tag |
| Content runs off the side of the screen | Visitors have to scroll sideways, or never see it | Element positions compared with the real screen width |
| Content is cut off on the left | That content cannot be reached by scrolling at all | Element positions |
| Buttons or links too small to tap | People tap the wrong thing, or give up | Controls under 24 pixels, the WCAG 2.2 minimum target size |
| Text too small to read | Visitors have to zoom to read | Text under 12 pixels |
How the phone view works
Provelex loads your pages in a browser set to behave like a phone, with a phone-sized screen, touch input and a phone identity sent to the site. The screen sizes are based on an iPhone (390 × 844) and a Pixel 7 (412 × 915). Each finding names the screen size it was seen on, and the affected elements.
What this does not cover
- It is a simulation, not a real device. It uses a Chromium browser in phone mode, so it will not catch a bug specific to Safari on a real iPhone.
- It checks layout rather than feel. It cannot tell whether a menu is pleasant to use with one thumb. Try your main journey on your own phone as well.
- Speed needs its own test. Slow mobile networks are covered by the free speed test, which throttles its phone profile.
Where to start
Look at sideways scrolling first. One element that is too wide, often an image, a table or a fixed-width container, can make a whole page scroll sideways, and fixing it can clear several findings at once. Tap targets and text size are usually a small change to shared styles.
Check your site at phone size
The free Basic assessment includes the mobile checks on up to three public pages, with no account.
Start an assessmentRelated pages
Need help with your account or a report? Email provelex@devsapience.com