How easy is it to contact a Jersey business from a phone?

How we tested

Sample. 50 websites from our Jersey business directory, chosen by a rule fixed before any site was tested: five customer-facing groups (trades and building, food and drink, health and care, hair, beauty and wellness, and shops and makers), excluding Jersey Web clients and listings that link to a social media page rather than the business’s own website. Each group was sorted alphabetically and ten evenly spaced listings taken. One site refused automated visits, so 49 were measured.

Method. Each homepage was loaded once in Chrome as a phone (a 375 × 812 screen with an Android browser), on 11 October 2026. We recorded only what a visitor could see or tap on the homepage: no clicks, no forms sent, no logins. The “first phone screen” is the part visible before scrolling. Accessibility was checked with the axe-core tool against WCAG 2.1 levels A and AA. Speed is one Google PageSpeed Insights mobile test per site; 43 sites completed it.

1. Most sites can be contacted, but not from the first screen

84% of homepages offer a direct way to get in touch, but only 49% show any contact route on the first screen a phone visitor sees. The route was usually there, but behind the menu or further down the page.

2. Where and when: often missing

Customers on a phone usually want to know two things fast: are you near me, and are you open?

3. Most homepages are slow on a phone

Google’s Largest Contentful Paint measures how long the main content takes to appear. Google rates 2.5 seconds or less as good and more than 4 seconds as poor.

These are single lab tests on a simulated mid-range phone and a slowed connection, not measurements of real visitors, and results vary between runs.

4. Automated accessibility checks found problems on almost every site

Automated tools catch only some accessibility problems, and a failure here is not a legal finding. It does mean some visitors will struggle to read or use the page.

5. Search basics

These help search engines and AI assistants understand what a page is about.

By type of business

Ten sites per group is too few to compare sectors with confidence. Treat these as illustrations, not rankings.

Limits

• 49 sites from one directory is not every Jersey business. The directory lists businesses we could find online, and we only tested ones with their own website, so businesses without one are not represented.
• Automated checks can miss things, such as a call button drawn as an image or opening hours inside a picture. We kept a screenshot of every first screen and checked findings by eye, including an untappable phone number and a page that blocks zooming.
• “Opening hours” counts text such as “Opening times”, “Monday – Saturday” or “9am – 6pm”, so an event time can occasionally be counted.
• We tested one homepage per site. Contact pages, menus and booking systems were not tested.

Data and corrections

The headline figures are also listed one per line on our Jersey business website statistics page. The totals above are in a CSV file. The figures and the CSV are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (opens in a new tab): you may quote, share and reuse them, including commercially, as long as you credit Jersey Web and link to this page. Run your own business and think we have counted something wrongly? Email hello@jerseyweb.je and we will check it and correct this page. We plan to repeat the study to see what changes.

Published by Jersey Web on 11 October 2026. Jersey Web builds websites for Jersey businesses, so we have an interest in this subject; the method above is fixed so that anyone can repeat it.