A Mobile Plugin Bolted Onto an Old Site

A quick fix for phones

The site was built before phones mattered. On a phone it opens as a tiny desktop page that has to be pinched and dragged to read.

An add-on promises to fix that in an afternoon: a plugin for the site's software, or an outside service that makes a phone version. Either way, phones are handed a generic mobile theme.

Overnight the site passes Google's Mobile-Friendly Test, and searches on phones show it with the mobile-friendly label. It looks solved.

For the people actually using it on a phone, it often is not.

What the add-on does

When a visitor arrives, the add-on reads the description each browser sends about itself. If it looks like a phone, the visitor gets the mobile theme instead of the site's own design.

The mobile theme is the same for every business that installs it: a plain header, a default colour, a menu of pages or recent posts, and the text from your pages poured into one column.

Some services go further and copy your pages to their own servers, sending phones to a separate address that they host.

What phone visitors lose

• The branding: colours, typefaces and a logo large enough to notice.
• Pages, left out of the phone menu or unreachable.
• Forms that no longer appear or no longer send.
• Maps, menus and booking tools, shown as blank spaces.
• Layouts built with the old theme's tools, shown as raw code.

The third costs the most, and quietly. A reservation or quote form that fails on phones loses exactly the visitors who were ready to act, and nobody at the business hears about it.

A different business on the phone

Customers rarely meet a business in one place. They see the sign, a printed menu, a Facebook page, the website on a laptop at work and again on a phone at night.

The generic theme breaks that chain. The phone version looks like every other site using the same add-on, and nothing like the business.

Some visitors decide they have reached the wrong site. Others decide the business does not care much about details, which is worse.

Why forms break

A form on the old site usually depends on scripts and styles loaded by the old theme, or on a feature built into it. The mobile theme loads none of them.

The form may vanish, appear as a line of code in square brackets, or appear and submit to nowhere. Booking widgets and embedded maps fail the same way, for lack of the scripts they need.

The only way to know is to fill in every form from a real phone and check that the message arrives.

Passing the test is not the same as working

Google's Mobile-Friendly Test checks how a page is laid out on a small screen: whether it is sized for the phone, whether the text is readable, whether links are far enough apart.

It does not check whether the pages customers need are reachable, whether forms send, or whether the business is recognisable. A generic theme passes easily because those are exactly the things it leaves out.

Webmaster Tools reports mobile problems too, and Google has been sending messages about them to site owners. A plugin can quiet the message without answering the customer.

A worked example

A fondue restaurant with forty seats in a converted house near a city's old town does most of its business in winter, and Valentine's Day is its busiest night of the year.

Last autumn the owner installed a mobile plugin after trying the site on his own phone. Phones now saw a white page with a small logo and a list of pages.

The menu, a PDF linked from a graphic on the home page, had no place in the phone menu. The reservation form showed as a line of code, and the page for the Valentine's dinner was missing entirely.

Guests phoned during dinner service to ask for the menu, and a regular mentioned that the website looked as if the restaurant had changed hands.

The owner kept the plugin running for six weeks while a responsive design was built. It uses the restaurant's own colours and photographs, puts the menu on the page as text, and has a reservation form tested on several phones.

The plugin came off the day the new design went live, before the Valentine's bookings opened.

Two versions to keep in step

An add-on also means two versions of the site. Opening hours, specials and seasonal pages have to work in both, and the phone version is the one nobody at the business looks at.

Check that phone visits are still being counted, too. Some mobile themes leave out the analytics code the main site carries.

When a stopgap is reasonable

A plugin is not useless. For a site already due for a redesign, it can tide phone visitors over for a few weeks, provided someone has checked the forms and key pages.

Configure what it allows: the logo, the colours, which pages appear. Then give it an end date, written down, so the stopgap does not quietly become the plan.

Planning a responsive design

The lasting fix is one site whose layout rearranges itself to suit the screen, so phones and computers see the same business, the same pages and the same forms.

Start the plan from what phone visitors come for. For a restaurant that is the menu, the hours, the address and a way to book; for a contractor, the services, the area covered and the phone number.

Put those first on the small screen, write them as text rather than PDFs or images, and fill in every form from both an iPhone and an Android phone before launch.

The counter-case

A very small site with few phone visitors and a redesign booked for spring loses little by running a well-configured plugin for a few weeks.

And some add-ons can be adjusted closely enough that the phone version looks like the business and its forms work. That takes testing, and someone checking it after every change.

For most sites, though, the plugin is a bridge, not a destination: use it briefly if at all, and plan the responsive design now.

Until the redesign

1. Open your site on two different phones.
2. Submit every form from a phone.
3. Compare the phone menu with the desktop menu.
4. List the pages phone visitors cannot reach.
5. Write an end date for the plugin.
6. Brief a responsive design around phone visitors' tasks.
7. Remove the plugin when the new design launches.

Step two is the one that finds the expensive problems. A page that looks plain still works; a form that does not send loses the customer who was ready to book.

A responsive design has its own pitfalls on phones, one of which is covered in images hidden on phones but still downloaded.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.