Your agency built a site that looks fine on desktop but is broken on every phone

What broken on mobile actually means

It is rarely one obvious thing. Usually it is a stack of small failures that add up to a site nobody can use on a phone.

• The menu button does not open, or opens behind other content
• Text runs off the edge of the screen and you have to scroll sideways to read it
• Buttons are too small to tap, or sit on top of each other
• Images are huge and take ages to load, or get cut in half
• Forms have fields you cannot type into
• The phone number is not clickable, so you cannot tap it to call

Any one of these on its own would be embarrassing. Most broken-on-mobile sites have all of them at once.

Why agencies ship sites like this

Agencies design on big monitors. The designer makes everything look beautiful at 1920 pixels wide. Then a junior developer is told to make it work on phones too. That second step is where things go wrong.

Building a site that works properly on mobile takes real time. You have to think about every screen size, test on actual devices, and rework layouts that looked great on desktop but make no sense on a phone. It is the part of the job that takes the longest and the part clients never see, so it is the first thing cut when the budget gets tight.

The agency signs off the build on their own laptops. The senior people approve it on their own laptops. Nobody picks up a phone until the client does.

What it is costing you

If most of your visitors are on phones and the phone version is broken, the website is not working. It does not matter how nice it looks on the desktop screenshots in the agency's portfolio.

Google also knows your site is broken on mobile. It has been ranking sites based on the mobile version first since 2019, so a desktop-only site quietly slides down the search results while you wonder why nobody is finding you. The agency that built it will charge you extra for SEO to fix a problem they caused.

A site that looks beautiful on a desktop and fails on a phone is a brochure for the agency, not a website for you.

How to check your site yourself

You do not need any technical knowledge to find out how bad it is. Do this now, on whatever phone you have.

• Open your site on your phone, not your laptop
• Try to open the menu. Does it work?
• Try to tap your phone number. Does it call you?
• Try to fill in the contact form. Can you actually type in every field?
• Scroll through every page. Is anything cut off, overlapping, or off-screen?
• Try it on a different phone too, ideally one that is not the same brand as yours

If anything fails, take screenshots. You will need them.

What to ask the agency

Send them the screenshots. Ask three direct questions.

• Was the site tested on real phones before launch, and if so, which ones?
• Is fixing the mobile version included in what I already paid for, or are you going to charge me again?
• How long will it take to fix?

If the answer to the second question is that they want more money, you have a decision to make. You paid for a working website. Half a website is not what you ordered. Whether you push back, refuse to pay extra, or move on depends on how much fight you have left in you.

Whatever you do, do not pay them again until the site works on a phone. The leverage is gone the moment money changes hands.

What a proper fix looks like

A proper mobile fix is not a few patches. It means rebuilding the layout so it is designed for small screens first and big screens second. That is how every site should be built in 2026, and it is not optional.

If your current agency cannot or will not do this for a sensible price, it is often cheaper to start again with someone who builds things properly the first time. A clean, hand-coded site loads in under two seconds on a phone, works on every screen size, and does not need a quarterly tune-up.

That is what I do at SkipTheAgency. A new build starts at £600, and the Maintained plan at £65/month keeps it working without surprise invoices. No ticket queues, no account managers, no charging you again for the thing you already paid for.