Most church homepages we audit look great on a laptop and then fall apart in a very specific way on a phone. The "Plan Your Visit" button sits shoulder-to-shoulder with "Watch Live." Both are about 32 pixels tall. On a thumb, they are close enough that half the taps hit the wrong one — and a first-time visitor gives up before they ever see the service times.
That is not a taste problem. It is a size problem, and there is a rule.
Apple's Human Interface Guidelines put the minimum tap target at 44×44 pixels. Google's Material guidelines set 48×48. WCAG 2.2 landed on 24×24 as the floor for a passing grade. If your primary calls to action are smaller than that, or crammed within a few pixels of each other, you are losing visits you will never see in analytics.
A few things we look at when we run this pass on a church site:
- Measure the real button, not the mockup. A 16-pixel text label with 8 pixels of padding is not a 44-pixel button. It is a 32-pixel button with a padding label. Pull the site up on your own phone and see if your thumb has to hunt.
- Give the primary CTA breathing room. On mobile, "Plan Your Visit" or "New Here" should be its own full-width block — not squeezed next to "Give" and "Watch." A vertical stack of large buttons out-performs a row of small ones almost every time.
- Watch the icons. Social icons in the footer, the hamburger menu, the sermon player controls — these are often the smallest targets on the whole site. Bump each one to at least 44 pixels of actual tappable area, even if the icon itself stays small.
- Test with older thumbs. The people most likely to visit a church website are not twenty-two-year-olds. Watch a parent or grandparent try to tap "Get Directions" and you will learn more than any performance report can tell you.
None of this is glamorous work. But a church website is a hospitality question before it is a design question, and on a phone, hospitality is measured in pixels.
If you would like a quick pass on your site's mobile tap targets, we would be glad to take a look. It is usually a small fix with an outsized return.