My Site Looks Broken on Mobile
Everything sits properly on desktop; on a phone it slides right, text overflows and buttons run into each other. Since most visitors arrive on a phone, this isn’t cosmetic — it’s lost sales.
Find where it breaks first
Switching to phone dimensions in your browser’s developer tools shows most problems immediately. But for the most common complaint — horizontal scrolling — there’s a faster method: open the page and swipe right. If a gap opens up, something is pushing it.
The practical way to find the culprit is to hide elements one by one in developer tools and catch the moment the overflow disappears. It’s usually one element, not several.
The six usual culprits
1. An element with a fixed width. A box pinned at width: 1200px overflows a 390-pixel phone. The correct property is max-width.
2. A table that won’t fit. A five-column table doesn’t fit a phone screen. Putting the table in its own scrollable container is far better than making the whole page scroll.
3. Long unbreakable text. A long address or email with no spaces won’t wrap, so it stretches its container.
4. Images without declared dimensions. Images with no width and height take up no space while loading, then push the content below them down when they arrive. That’s the “jumping” effect — and search engines measure it.
5. Page builder settings. Elementor and its peers have separate mobile settings per section: padding, column order, visibility. When everything is set on desktop and the mobile tab is never opened, this is where the breakage comes from.
6. A sticky header. A fixed menu that covers a large part of a phone screen hides the content. Its height needs setting separately for mobile.
Before you fix
Don’t edit CSS directly on the live site. A change can fix one place and break another, and without a way back that’s hard to notice. Back up first, change one thing at a time, and check after each step.
Want me to look? I can go through your mobile layout, find the source of the overflow and give you a fix order. Get in touch.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Google really care about the mobile view?
Yes. Google evaluates sites through their mobile version; being perfect on desktop isn’t enough on its own. Content jumping is measured separately too.
Would changing the theme fix it?
Sometimes, but a theme change is the riskiest intervention available. The problem is usually not in the theme but in one section’s settings — look there first.
Should I build a separate mobile site?
No, separate mobile sites are no longer recommended. One site that adapts to screen size is the standard approach.
It’s also slower on mobile, are they related?
Partly. The same heavy images can break the layout and slow the page at once — I covered that on my website is very slow.
How do I work?
Work-hour packages
Tell me about your website and what you need on WhatsApp or by phone; we agree on a work block of somewhere between 5 and 40 hours and I start doing what is needed. What you get is not a calendar window — it is net working hours spent directly on your business. I can use 40 hours working three days straight, or deliberately spread it out and finish it over a year — whatever the work calls for. I do not spend my time estimating how long something will take, I spend it doing the work; every hour I spend has a lasting result on your site. We keep going for as long as you find it useful.
Why not monthly?
Is 40 hours a week?
On a fixed monthly fee both sides are watching the wrong thing: you watch a fixed cost, the other side watches how many more contracts like this they can line up. Working by the hour puts us both in front of the same thing — the real value of the work that got done. I know not having an upfront answer to "how much will this cost in total?" is the natural cost of this model. But instead of paying a fixed fee for months to a setup that is not producing results, you only pay for the qualified time spent on your work — and you see exactly where that time went, start to finish. That is why my clients keep coming back.