How to make your phone numbers clickable for mobile devices

If your business focuses a lot on phone calls then make sure you take the 5 minutes on your website and at least make them clickable. There is nothing more frustrating for a person on the road hitting your site and tapping your number, only to find they have to fiddle with their copy and paste to give you a call. 

Mobile traffic makes up for about 25-30% of all traffic now 45-50%; sometimes more depending upon the nature of your product or service (I have the AdWords + GA data to prove it!). And there are a ton of great statistics on mobile traffic out there. More and more people are browsing on their tablets and phones and having a phone number that they can press on and have it instantly dial is crucial for your conversions!

As you read my blog, you will find out that I am a big fan of responsive websites. I do not like mobile-only sites, however, both can be very effective.

If your phone numbers aren’t clickable, most likely you have missed out on conversions!

How to make your phone number clickable

I will use 1-800-000-0000 for my example. We are going to take this and add the tel: tag to it. So add the following.

<a href="tel:1-800-000-0000">1-800-000-0000</a>

This is how it will look afterwards. 1-800-000-0000.

Clicking on the link from a desktop without any communication apps like Skype or Google Voice installed will result in an error. However, in my opinion, I would rather have mobile devices be able to click the phone number and desktops with communication apps than not linking it at all. You could get fancy and write some PHP to strip this off when running a desktop browser, but I wouldn’t advise it.

Should you use callto: or tel:?

There is also another tag that is used by the Skype protocol, which is callto: However, I would recommend sticking with tel: In fact, testing tel: from a desktop on Windows 8, automatically launches my Skype metro app. So more things are still adopting the tel: protocol and it is the most widely used.

As always feel free to leave your comments below!

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Brian Jackson

I craft actionable content and develop performance-driven WordPress plugins. Connect on X, subscribe to my newsletter (once a month), or buy me coffee.

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