Most of the mobile complaints I heard in boardrooms were framed as design problems. They were not. The phone version of a financial services site usually fails for reasons that have little to do with how it looks and everything to do with what it makes a visitor do - pinch, zoom, scroll sideways, download a file, or give up and ring the firm down the road.
Watch what a phone visitor to an accounting firm's site actually does and the list is short. They check the street address before a meeting in town. They tap the phone number. They look up which partner handles trusts, or whether the person they were referred to still works there. Occasionally they start an enquiry, and a good number of those get finished later on a laptop.
That is close to the whole picture. It is not a smaller version of a desktop visit, it is a different visit with different intent. Nobody arrives on a phone intending to compare three firms' service pages side by side.
Design for those four jobs and the mobile site works. Design for a general audience doing general things and it works for nobody in particular.
The comparison research - the part where a prospect reads your team bios, your specialisms, your approach to fees - happens on a desktop, usually at work, usually in a tab alongside two competitors. That is the session worth writing for.
The phone session is the one either side of it. Before: a quick check that you exist, that you are in Hamilton and not Auckland, that the office is not a residential address. After: a tap on the number, once they have decided.
Firms invert this constantly. They cram the phone layout with the long-form persuasion content, because that content matters, then wonder why nothing converts on mobile. The persuasion is not failing on the phone. It was never being read there.
The fee schedule as a PDF is close to universal in this sector, and I understand how it happens. It started life as a document the practice manager updates in Word, and putting it on the site as a download was the path of least resistance.
On a phone it is close to useless. An A4 page rendered on a 390-pixel screen arrives as a wall of six-point type. The visitor pinches, drags, loses their place, and on some Android browsers gets bounced into a download prompt or a separate viewer app with no obvious way back to your site.
You have taken the single most-wanted piece of information on the site and put it behind a format built for printing. If the numbers change twice a year, they belong on a page as text.
Same disease, different symptom. Service comparison tables, fund summaries, team directories with five columns - all built and signed off on a 27-inch monitor, none of them tested at 390 pixels.
What usually happens is one of two things. The table squashes until the columns are a word wide and the rows run eight lines deep, or it overflows into a horizontal scroll that the visitor never discovers, because nothing on the screen suggests there is more to the right.
The fix is not a plugin. It is deciding what the table is for. A four-column comparison usually collapses to a stacked card per option, one heading and three lines, and reads better on the phone than it ever did on the desktop.
This one still surprises me, and I have found it on sites built inside the last three years. The number sits in a header graphic, or in a footer banner exported straight from the designer's file, baked into a JPEG along with the logo and the tagline.
It cannot be tapped. It cannot be copied. It does not appear when someone uses their browser's find function, and it is invisible to a screen reader.
The visitor's options are to memorise it, or to type it into the dialler while standing in a car park. Some will. Most go back to the search results, where three competitors have a tappable number in the first line of their listing.
A phone number should be live text wrapped in a tel: link. That is the whole requirement.
Enquiry forms in this sector grow by accretion. Someone adds a dropdown for service type. Someone else adds preferred contact time, because a partner was annoyed about being rung at nine. Compliance adds a checkbox. Marketing adds how did you hear about us. Three years later the form has fifteen fields and a captcha, and it is the only route into the firm other than the phone.
On a phone that is a long, joyless scroll for someone who wanted to say they need a new accountant and here is their number.
Name, one contact field, one free-text box. Everything else can be asked in the reply, by a human, who will get a better answer anyway. The qualifying questions are not free - each one is paid for in abandoned enquiries you never see.
Even a short form fails if it fights the device. Set the input types and the phone brings up the right keyboard: a numeric pad for the phone field, the at-symbol layout for email. Leave them as generic text and the visitor types a phone number on a full alphabetic keyboard.
Then there is the part almost nobody tests, which is what the screen looks like with the keyboard open. On a smaller handset the keyboard takes roughly half the viewport, so a submit button sitting directly under the last field ends up behind it.
Validation errors have the same problem. An error rendered at the top of a form the visitor has already scrolled past is a message nobody reads. Put it against the field it belongs to.
Sticky headers were sold to this sector as a conversion feature - the phone number always visible, the enquiry button always there. On a desktop that is defensible. On a phone it is a tax on every scroll.
Add it up on a typical firm site. A sticky header with logo and menu, a cookie banner that will not dismiss until it is tapped, a chat bubble, and a notification bar about the office closing for Christmas. That is a real combination I have measured, and it left about half the screen for the actual page.
If something has to persist, make it one thing, make it short, and make it the thing a phone visitor came for.
Menu items set at 14 pixels with tight line spacing look elegant in a design file and are miserable under a thumb. Footer link lists are worse - ten links stacked a few pixels apart, half of them pointing at pages nobody wants.
There is a published floor for this. The W3C's minimum target size guidance is worth forwarding to whoever built your site, and the practical version of it is simple: anything meant to be tapped needs enough padding around it that a thumb can hit it without aiming.
This matters more for your audience than for most. A meaningful share of the people looking up an accountant or a mortgage broker are over fifty and reading without their glasses on. Precision tapping is not a fair assumption.
The framing that fixes most of this is treating the phone version as a triage surface rather than a second website. Its job is to get a visitor to the right answer or the right person quickly, and to hand the long reading off to a bigger screen.
That means the phone layout can legitimately be shorter. It can lead with address, hours, number and a single enquiry route, and push the eight hundred words about your audit methodology further down or behind a tap. Nothing is being hidden, it is being ordered for the visit that is actually happening.
Firms resist this because it feels like the mobile site is being demoted. It is the opposite. You are giving the phone visitor what they came for, instead of material written for someone else.
You do not need to be able to build any of this to hold a designer to it. Five questions cover most of the ground:
- Can I see the fee schedule, the team page and the enquiry form on your phone before we sign anything off?
- Is the phone number live text with a tel: link, or is it part of an image?
- What does the enquiry form look like with the keyboard open?
- How many fields does the form have, and what happens to the enquiry rate if we halve them?
- How much of the screen do the header, cookie banner and chat widget take between them?
If those get vague answers, the mobile version has not been thought about. It has been generated by the theme and left where it landed.
The firms that have got this right did not spend more than the ones that have not. They decided what the phone was for, then removed whatever stood between a visitor and that. It is the one part of the job an agency cannot decide for you, and it costs an afternoon of looking honestly at your own site on your own phone.
