Depending on your business or your website, you may have your phone number listed so that people can contact you. It’s common for coaches and consultants to want clients or prospects to call them directly. So make it easy for your website visitors to phone you with a Click-to-Call button. (also known as Tap-to-Call)
Click to Call buttons are particularly useful when someone is using a mobile device. When they tap on the button, their phone app will open and a message pops up that says, “Do you want to call [phone number]?” They can click yes, and the phone will start dialing your number.
This eliminates the hassle of having to copy/paste or type in the phone number. You’ve probably used this feature on your mobile phone when wanting to call a restaurant from their website.
Adding a Click to Call Link/Button to Your Website
So if you’re going to have a phone number displayed on your site, I recommend that you implement this. It’s easy to add and makes you more accessible to your website visitors. After all, who wants to manually dial a phone number? Also, more people are visiting websites from their mobile devices than ever before. Checking a phone number on a website, writing it down or memorizing it, and then switching to the phone to manually punch in the number… Too much work!
When you click/tap on a Click-to-Call link, the browser automatically asks you if you’d like to make a phone call to that number, and if you proceed, it automatically launches the available phone on the device you are using and dials the number for you. No more dialing a long phone number. Instead, all you need to do is to click on that link.
The Click-to-Call feature is another way you can make your site more mobile-friendly. For more information about mobile-friendliness, check out my article on Simple Tools to Check How Your Site Looks on Mobile.
Creating that link for your website is pretty simple, too. Here’s how to do so in WordPress. (The screenshots below were done in the Classic Editor, but the idea is the same with the Block Editor.)
Adding a Click-to-Call Link
We’ll use 800-555-1212 in this example:
- Type text you’d like people to add a Click-to-Call link to. For example, “Click here to call us.”
- Select the text you created above, and click on the Insert link button in the toolbar.
- For the link destination, type “tel:” followed by the phone number without dashes and save.
Publish the page and see how it looks and works on your desktop and mobile. It depends on your browser settings, too, but if you tap on that link in your browser, most likely it will automatically launch your phone with the above number already ready to be dialed.
[Note on the phone number format and country codes]
It’s recommended to always use the international dialing format to create your click-to-call link: the plus sign (+), country code, area code, and number. (Using “+” and “-” is not mandatory, but it helps with better auto-detection.) Check the international dialing format for your country as there are some variations. (For more a list of country codes, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_telephone_country_codes)
Examples:
tel:+1-858-609-9358
– In the above example, “+1” is the country code for many of the North American countries including the U.S.
tel:+64-3-123-4567
– In the above example, “+64” is the country code for New Zealand.
Find your country code here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country_calling_codes
Adding a Click-to-Call Button
If you want to be a bit fancier, you might want to create a button or a graphic and just add a “tel:…” link to that button, just like we did above. The idea is the same.
Click here to call us (example only)
When building a website, many people tend to get all excited about the look, but I can’t stress enough the importance of always keeping the website visitors in mind.
Let’s make it as easy as possible for people to call you. Just add a Click (Tap) to Call link to your website!
