What a phone visitor actually sees
Open your site on a phone. First a cookie banner takes up the bottom half of the screen. Then a popup asks for an email address. A chat bubble sits over the call button. The page underneath is there somewhere, but the visitor has to close two things and aim around a third before they can read a word.
At your desk, with a big screen and a dismissed banner from months ago, you never see this. Most of your visitors see it every time.
How overlays pile up
Each one was added separately by a different person for a good reason: legal wanted consent, marketing wanted subscribers, sales wanted chat. Nobody checks what they look like together on a small screen.
| Overlay | Common problem on mobile |
|---|---|
| Cookie consent banner | Takes up a large part of the screen, or only offers Accept |
| Newsletter or offer popup | Appears before the visitor has read anything |
| Chat widget | Covers the call or submit button |
| Sticky headers and footers | Leave a narrow strip of actual content |
Cookie banners have a second problem. Many sites use a plugin that shows a banner but loads the tracking scripts anyway, or makes rejecting much harder than accepting. That is both off-putting for visitors and at odds with UK guidance on consent.
What the overlays cost
Some visitors leave rather than fight through them, particularly on paid clicks where they arrived expecting a specific answer. Others miss the call button because something is covering it. Overlays that move content as they load also make people tap the wrong thing.
And a consent setup that does not do what it claims is a compliance risk as well as a user experience problem.
There is a measurement cost as well. When tracking loads regardless of consent, or when some visitors never get past the overlays, the analytics you use to judge campaigns are distorted in ways nobody can quite explain. Decisions about which pages and ads work get made on numbers that do not describe what real visitors did.
How we clean it up
- Record the site as a first-time visitor sees it, on several real phones and screen sizes, with every overlay that appears.
- List every script that sets cookies or tracks, and which are strictly necessary and which need consent.
- Replace the banner with a compact consent bar that offers equal Accept and Reject choices, with settings for anyone who wants detail.
- Make sure tracking such as Google Analytics or ad pixels only loads after consent, using consent mode or tag manager rules, and test it.
- Stop overlays from stacking. The consent bar appears first; anything else waits, or goes altogether on mobile.
- Move chat so it cannot sit on top of call and submit buttons, and keep the phone number and enquiry button visible.
- Check again on the same phones and confirm the enquiry route is visible without dismissing anything.
We explain the consent rules as the regulator's guidance describes them, but we are not your legal advisers, so for anything unusual we suggest checking with yours.
What visitors get
A page they can read straight away, a small consent choice they can answer in one tap, and a call button nothing covers. You get tracking that follows the choice people made, which also makes your analytics more honest about who consented.
Is this your site?
- The cookie banner covers much of the screen on phones
- More than one popup appears on arrival
- The chat bubble sits over a button
- Rejecting cookies takes more clicks than accepting
- Analytics loads before anyone has chosen
- Nobody has looked at the site as a first-time mobile visitor