A customer who found you on a phone is already holding the dialer. Whether they can use it comes down to one line of HTML. On the June 2022 crawl of 7,905,956 mobile sites, a tel: link was on 26.54% of mobile pages (Web Almanac, 2022). That crawl is the last time anyone measured it.
Can a customer call you in one tap from your website?
Only if the page carries a tel: link. About one in four mobile pages did on that crawl, which means roughly three in four did not.
View data
| Step | Value |
|---|---|
| of sites get more traffic from phones | 67% (Chrome UX Report, June 2022) |
| of mobile pages carry a tel: link | 26.54% (Web Almanac, 2022 crawl) |
| opens the dialer, digits already in it | 1 tap (the phone app does the dialing, not your site) |
| digits the customer has to type | 0 (no copy and paste, no switching apps) |
Why can almost nobody text your business from your site?
Because the link is almost never there. An sms: link appeared on 0.27% of mobile pages, behind both of the chat apps sitting next to it in the same measurement.
Web Almanac, 2022 crawl · 7,905,956 mobile sites, June 2022, home pages
View data
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| mailto | 29.36% of mobile pages |
| tel | 26.54% of mobile pages |
| 0.61% of mobile pages | |
| Viber | 0.47% of mobile pages |
| sms | 0.27% of mobile pages |
| Skype | 0.27% of mobile pages |
The most common of the set, and the one that opens a mail app the customer may never have set up on that phone.
Opens the dialer with your number already in it. About one in four mobile pages had it on the June 2022 crawl.
Opens the messaging app with your number in the To field. Fewer than three mobile pages in a thousand carried one.
More common than the native text link, which is the part the chapter itself calls surprising and disappointing.
The tap-to-call link is the one that grew: 24.2% of mobile pages on the July 2021 crawl, 26.54% a year later. Two crawls, not a trend line.
Web Almanac · July 2021 and June 2022 crawls, mobile pages, same query
View data
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| July 2021 | 24.2% of mobile pages |
| June 2022 | 26.54% of mobile pages |
Is your call button big enough to hit with a thumb?
On 42% of mobile pages, yes. That is the share where the tap target audit applied and found not one undersized target.
The smallest size the audit treats as hittable, a rough stand-in for a fingertip on a touchscreen.
Targets closer than that fail even when each one is big enough on its own, because a thumb cannot separate them.
Of the mobile pages where the audit applied, that share had zero undersized targets. The score is not pass or fail, so this is the share with no failures at all, not the share that is roughly fine.
Among the pages that do fail, the median page has five undersized targets, and the worst tenth have at least 27 of them.
Web Almanac, 2022 crawl · mobile pages scoring under 0.9 on the tap-targets audit
View data
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| 10th percentile | 1failures per page |
| 25th percentile | 2failures per page |
| Median | 5failures per page |
| 75th percentile | 12failures per page |
| 90th percentile | 27failures per page |
Does your form bring up the number keypad?
Usually not. Among mobile pages that ask for a phone number, 62.6% had at least one field missing type="tel", so the customer gets a letter keyboard and has to switch.
Web Almanac, 2022 crawl · denominator is pages with an input, not all pages
View data
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| text | 71% of pages with a form field |
| hidden | 53% of pages with a form field |
| submit | 38% of pages with a form field |
| 27% of pages with a form field | |
| checkbox | 27% of pages with a form field |
| search | 25% of pages with a form field |
| password | 13% of pages with a form field |
| tel | 6% of pages with a form field |
The keyboard that comes up
lettersthe number pad
62.6% of mobile pages asking for a phone number had at least one field missing type="tel" (Web Almanac, July 2021 crawl).
Pages that ask for a phone at all
5.4%the contact form
Only 5.4% of mobile home pages asked for a phone number, against 25.1% that asked for an email (Web Almanac, July 2021 crawl).
Advanced input types in use
44.8%47%
Of mobile pages with at least one input, 47% used one or more advanced type in the June 2022 crawl, up from 44.8% in July 2021 (Web Almanac).
The form itself
more fieldsfewer fields
The keypad is only half of it. See how many fields a quote request form needs.
View data
| Metric | Day zero → target |
|---|---|
| The keyboard that comes up | letters → the number pad |
| Pages that ask for a phone at all | 5.4% → the contact form |
| Advanced input types in use | 44.8% → 47% |
| The form itself | more fields → fewer fields |
Does this matter if your customers use a desktop?
For most sites, yes. In June 2022, 67% of the websites in the Chrome UX Report took more traffic from phones than from desktops, and 88% of the thousand most visited did.
Chrome UX Report, June 2022 · origins by popularity rank, tablet excluded
View data
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Top 1,000 | 88% of sites |
| Top 10,000 | 89% of sites |
| Top 100,000 | 86% of sites |
| Top 1 million | 82% of sites |
| All sites | 67% of sites |
- 01Put a tel: link on the numberThe number in your header and your footer becomes a link whose href starts with tel: and carries the digits. That is the entire feature, and the phone app does the rest.
- 02Put an sms: link beside itSame idea, different protocol. It was on 0.27% of mobile pages in the June 2022 crawl, which makes it both the cheapest thing to add and the rarest thing to find.
- 03Put type="tel" on the phone fieldOne attribute on one input. Among mobile pages asking for a phone number, 62.6% were missing it on at least one field in the July 2021 crawl, and the keyboard pays for it.
- 04Give both targets roomA link that dials is no use if the thumb lands on the one above it. No smaller than 48 by 48 pixels, no closer than 8 pixels, is what the audit looks for.
Open your own site on your phone and tap your own number. If it dials, the link is there. If it selects text instead, it never was, and the call you were waiting on never rang.
Does the dialer open with the digits already in it, or does the page just select the text and leave you to copy it?
Does a mail app open, or does nothing happen because this phone has no mail account set up on it?
Does a number pad come up, or do you get letters and have to hunt for the switch?
Did you hit the one you aimed at, or the one sitting eight pixels above it?
Questions owners ask
How do I add a click-to-call button to my website?
It is a link, not a plugin: an anchor whose href starts with tel: and carries the digits. On the June 2022 crawl, 26.54% of mobile pages had one, against 29.36% with a mailto link (Web Almanac, 2022). The phone app does the rest.
Can customers text my business from my website?
Only if there is an sms: link, and almost nobody puts one there: 0.27% of mobile pages, fewer than the 0.61% with a WhatsApp link (Web Almanac, June 2022 crawl). Whether the text reaches a person is a separate question.
Why does my form show letters when it asks for a phone number?
Because the field is not type="tel". Among mobile pages that ask for a phone number, 62.6% had at least one field missing it (Web Almanac, July 2021 crawl). The fix is one attribute, and the keypad comes up numeric.
How big does a tap target need to be?
The audit looks for no smaller than 48 by 48 pixels, at least 8 pixels apart. 42% of mobile pages passed it without a single failure; among the pages that fail, the median is five undersized targets (Web Almanac, 2022 crawl).
Sources
- Web Almanac 2022, Mobile Web chapter (HTTP Archive, June 2022 crawl; 7,905,956 mobile websites of 8,360,179; home pages; chapter source and the queries behind each figure read November 6, 2026) (2022)
- Web Almanac 2022, Methodology (dataset size, crawl date, and the note that most chapters used just the home pages) (2022)
- Web Almanac 2021, Mobile Web chapter (HTTP Archive, July 2021 crawl; 7,499,763 mobile websites of 8,198,531; the phone and email field figures come from a detector that fuzzy-matches English field names, so sites in other languages are undercounted) (2021)
- Web Almanac 2021, Methodology (dataset size and crawl date) (2021)
The first meeting starts with findings, not promises.The free Business Health Report reads your business and shows you what it found, in days.
Get Your Free Business Health Report