Tampa Finishes Last of 24 Cities on Phones, and I’d Fix Three Things

I once spent an entire Saturday making a Tampa client’s homepage beautiful.

Big monitor, dark room, second pot of coffee. At one point I nudged her logo four pixels to the left and sat back like I’d performed surgery.

She opened it Monday morning in her van, on a phone with a crack running across the screen, and asked me why her own phone number was hiding behind the little menu button.

I’d built the whole thing for an audience of one. That one was me.

That Saturday comes back to me every time I rank the 24 cities on their mobile checks, because Tampa is the one sitting at the bottom.

76.1% of the sites I opened here clear Google’s basic mobile checks, which sounds perfectly fine right up until you notice it’s the lowest of the 24 cities I checked.

Last place is less dramatic than it sounds, mind you.

The national figure is 78%, so nobody is running away with this one. Montreal sits directly above Tampa. Winston-Salem sits up at the top, and there’s nobody underneath.

A city average hides a lot, though. Two Montreal businesses doing identical work, four streets apart, came back with opposite results.

What the check is asking

Google loads your homepage into a phone sized window and comes away with a single verdict.

Was the writing big enough to read without zooming in? Did the page stay inside the window, or did a chunk of it run off the right hand edge?

A fail is almost never a design crime. It’s one setting nobody switched on, in a theme that could have handled the job the whole time.

Hand your phone to someone who’s never seen your site and ask her to find your number on it. How long do you stand there?

Watching a stranger use your page is most of what user experience work amounts to, and it costs nothing but the awkwardness.

None of this rests on a handful of sites, either. I sampled 6,108 businesses across all 47 industries in the city and audited 4,126 of their websites, and you can pull the same rates back with a sample size beside each one by setting the city box on the report’s explorer to Tampa and leaving the box next to it empty.

I ran the mobile check twice, because a city with quick, tidy, perfectly modern looking websites finishing last on the phone struck me as a typo.

It wasn’t.

So if someone handed you one afternoon and no money at all, where should it go? I’ve got an order. The last item on the list is the one that saves you the most.

1. The phone layout

Give me that afternoon and I’d spend all of it here, then go home.

Open your own homepage on your phone, outside, with the wifi switched off. Try to drag the page sideways. Try to read your opening hours without zooming in.

If either of those goes badly, you’ve found your job for the week.

The fix usually lives in a settings panel rather than in a new website. Whoever built the site can do it before lunch, and the ones who care will be a bit embarrassed you had to ask.

If they tell you it needs a rebuild instead, get a second opinion from someone who isn’t quoting you for a rebuild. Most of the calls I get about a website in this city are for rebuilds nobody needed.

Why does a whole city end up down there? My best guess is age, and the particular kind of age that comes from a site being looked after by four different people over ten years, none of whom were told what the other three had already changed.

Themes bought in 2016 and never touched since, plugins bolted on for a campaign that ended years ago, and a slider across the top that behaves itself on a laptop and falls to pieces at the width of a hand.

Nobody notices, because owners look at their own site on the machine they built it on.

Who in your life has told you your website is hard to use on a phone? Nobody, probably. People don’t report that sort of thing. They just leave and call the next name down.

Passing this check isn’t the finish line either. Restaurants clear it better than nearly every trade I audit, then leave the same customer waiting on a blank screen.

2. A way in that isn’t a phone call

Picture her in a parking lot at half past nine at night, holding whatever broke, wanting to talk to no human being on earth.

27.5% of the homepages I opened here give her a form to type into instead. The rest ask her to dial, and she won’t, because dialing means talking and talking means committing to something before she’s ready.

Nobody is doing well at this one, to be fair. The national figure is 28%, and it has irritated me in every city I’ve counted.

Adding a form is a job for whoever holds your login. It has nothing to do with how the site looks, which is exactly why it keeps falling off the bottom of every quote.

Then test it. Fill it in yourself from your phone, send it, and go and see whether the thing you typed lands in an inbox that a living person still opens on a Monday.

I’ve found forms quietly mailing to an address that belonged to a bookkeeper who left in 2021. Twice.

3. The line at the top of the page

Google went looking for the headline on a client’s homepage last spring and came back holding the words “Excellence, Delivered”.

Her slogan was the only line the code had marked as the H1, so her slogan is what got carried off, and nothing on that page ever said what she sold.

73.2% of the pages I checked in the city carry an H1 at all, and plenty of the ones that do are wearing the business name on its own, which tells a stranger nothing she didn’t already have.

Rewrite yours to say what you sell and the town you sell it in. Ten minutes, free, and no designer alive will ever put it on an invoice.

What would your homepage say if a visitor read the biggest line on it and then left?

What I wouldn’t spend a dollar on

If the proposal in your hand has a line item for the padlock in the address bar, ask the person what it’s for.

94.6% of the sites I opened in this city already load over a secure address, and the few that don’t are usually so far gone that the padlock is the smallest of their troubles.

I also wouldn’t buy a redesign. Not for any of this.

A layout setting and a missing form are not artwork problems, and new artwork will not fix either one. It will, though, cost you the three afternoons you could have spent on the list above.

There’s a version of my trade that sells you the expensive thing because the cheap thing sounds too easy to charge for. Watch for it.

So ask the person quoting you which of these three he’d do first, and then watch whether he shortens the quote to match his own answer. Mine gets shorter. Most don’t.

If you’d rather hand the whole walk to someone else, my audit form runs these checks and emails you what it found. No pitch attached, and you can take the list to whoever already looks after your site.