A 90-day plan to make your website mobile-friendly

Key takeaways

A mobile website improvement plan works best in a fixed order: measure, fix what stops people acting, fix what slows them down, then review. Ninety days is enough for a small business to move a site from usable-but-leaking to mobile-ready without a rebuild, provided the work starts with numbers and ends with the same numbers re-measured.

• Weeks 1 to 2: measure. Device split, mobile enquiries and a scorecard on a real phone.
• Weeks 3 to 6: fix the first screen, the calls to action and the forms.
• Weeks 7 to 10: fix speed, images, pop-ups and content parity.
• Weeks 11 to 13: test on real devices, re-score and compare enquiries.

Why follow a plan instead of fixing things as you spot them?

Because order matters and evidence matters. Fixing page speed before tracking is in place means you cannot show whether it helped. Polishing typography while the phone number cannot be tapped spends effort on the smaller problem. A plan puts the changes that affect enquiries first and builds in a before-and-after comparison.

This plan from Global Bridge Labs (GBL) uses the GBL Mobile Readiness Scorecard, which rates Read, Tap, Speed, Act and Parity from 0 to 2 each. The aim over 90 days is to raise the total to 8 or more and to see mobile enquiries rise with it.

• Why mobile-friendly web design is essential for UK businesses
• The mobile readiness scorecard: score your site in an hour

Weeks 1 to 2: what should you measure?

Measure where you are, so that day 90 means something. Record the mobile share of visits and of enquiries, score the top three landing pages on a real phone, and make sure every route to an enquiry is tracked. If calls and WhatsApp taps are not recorded, set that up first.

• GA4 device report: sessions and key events by device for 90 days.
• Key events in place for forms, tap-to-call and WhatsApp.
• Scorecard on your top three landing pages, on mobile data.
• PageSpeed Insights on the mobile tab for the same pages.
• Search Console: clicks and position by device.
• A written list of every failure found, page by page.

• Mobile and desktop in GA4: find where phones lose enquiries
• Track every website enquiry to its source

Weeks 3 to 6: what should you fix first?

Fix whatever stops a mobile visitor from acting. This is the Act and Tap part of the scorecard and it produces the quickest change in enquiries. Start with the first screen of your top landing pages, then the contact routes, then the forms.

• Rewrite first screens to say what you do, where, and what to do next.
• Make every phone number a tap-to-call link.
• Add a slim Call and WhatsApp bar, or one Book button, on mobile.
• Cut forms to the fields needed to reply, with correct keyboards and autofill.
• Enlarge buttons and space out links to about 48px targets.
• Remove pop-ups that appear on arrival.

• Mobile form design: forms people finish on a phone
• The thumb zone: design mobile pages for one-handed use
• Intrusive interstitials: pop-ups Google marks down on mobile

Weeks 7 to 10: what comes next?

Next comes Read, Speed and Parity: making pages comfortable to read, quick to load and complete. These changes support rankings as well as visitors, because Google indexes the mobile version and uses Core Web Vitals from real visits.

• Raise body text to at least 16px and check contrast.
• Compress and resize images, starting with the largest on each key page.
• Remove sliders, background video and unused scripts.
• Fix any page that scrolls sideways.
• Rework tables and replace PDFs with web pages.
• Compare mobile and desktop content and restore anything hidden on mobile.

• Why is your mobile PageSpeed score lower than desktop?
• Does Google index content hidden on mobile?
• Font size for mobile websites: what is readable?

Weeks 11 to 13: how do you test and review?

Test on real devices, re-score and compare. Run your main journeys on at least one iPhone and one Android phone. Score the same three pages again. Then compare mobile enquiries for the most recent four weeks with the four weeks before you started, allowing for seasonality.

• Device test: iPhone and Android, on mobile data, including the forms.
• Scorecard: same pages, same phone, target 8 or more.
• Enquiries: mobile key events before and after.
• PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals on mobile.
• A short list of what remains, in priority order, for the next quarter.

• Which devices should you test your website on?

What will the plan cost in time and money?

For a site that is already responsive and maintainable, the work in this plan usually falls within an indicative £500 to £3,000 of external help, depending on the number of templates and how much you do yourself. Allow a few hours of your own time each fortnight for decisions, content and testing.

If the audit in weeks 1 to 2 shows the platform cannot be fixed, the plan changes. A fixed-width site, a separate mobile site or an unsupported theme points to a redesign or rebuild, with indicative ranges of £3,000 to £12,000 and £5,000 to £20,000 or more. Knowing that by week 2 is itself a good result.

• What it costs to make a website mobile-friendly in the UK
• A 90-day plan to turn a good website into a converting one

When should you not follow this plan?

Skip it if mobile is a small share of your traffic and already converts at more than half the desktop rate. Your effort is better spent on visibility or on the offer itself. Skip it too if a rebuild is already scheduled within a few months: put the mobile requirements into the new build's brief and acceptance criteria instead.

And pause it if the business cannot handle more enquiries. Making it easier to call a firm that does not answer the phone creates complaints. Fix response capacity first.

• Mobile acceptance criteria to put in a website contract

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see when businesses improve mobile without a plan: a new theme is installed, images are compressed, a chat widget is added, and three months later nobody can say whether enquiries improved, because nothing was measured at the start and several changes overlapped.

Run in order, the same effort produces a clear story: a score that moved from 5 to 8, a mobile enquiry count before and after, and a short list for next quarter. Across our client work we have seen a 2.4x enquiry rate from conversion changes of this kind, and the measurement is what lets a business know it happened.

• See client work
• Website Design & Development for UK businesses
• Make your website work properly on mobile

Next step

Put two dates in your diary: one this week to measure, and one 90 days from now to re-measure. Everything between is easier once those two are fixed.