Fix library · Technical

The one tag that makes a site mobile-friendly

Open the site on a phone and the whole desktop layout is there, shrunk to the width of a thumbnail, with text nobody can read without pinching. That is almost always one missing line in the page head. It matters more than it looks: Google ranks your site on the mobile version, so this is the version being judged.

No mobile viewport declared

What SEOPert detected

A page has no viewport declaration, so phones will render it as a shrunken desktop layout.

What this means

Without a mobile viewport setting, phones show a zoomed-out desktop page. Google ranks based on the mobile version of your site.

How to fix it

  1. This usually means an outdated theme or template. Switch to a mobile-friendly (responsive) theme, or ask your developer to add the viewport tag.

If you are handing this to a developer

Add <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> in <head>, then test layouts on small screens.

Check it worked. Open the page on a phone: text should be readable without zooming.

Check your own site

See which of these apply to you.

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