SEO finding
The viewport tag is missing, wrong, or stops visitors zooming
SEO Error Severity: High
Part of the audit Mobile rendering. Finding id: seo.mobileViewport.
What it costs you
Without width=device-width a phone shows the desktop layout shrunk down. Visitors have to zoom and scroll sideways to read.
What to do
Use width=device-width, initial-scale=1 and nothing that limits zooming.
What it checks
- Mobile screen setting missing or wrong
- Visitors cannot zoom
How to fix it
Remove the zoom limits from the viewport tag
- Delete user-scalable=no (or user-scalable=0) and maximum-scale from the content of the tag.
- If a layout breaks when zoomed, fix the layout. Do not lock the zoom.
How to check: On a phone, pinch to zoom: the page enlarges.
Set the viewport tag in the page head
How to check: View the page source: there is one viewport tag, without user-scalable=no and without maximum-scale.
A real case
Researchers at Stone Temple Consulting tracked the top 10 results for 15,235 queries before and after Google's mobile-friendly update of April 2015. Nearly half of the pages Google did not consider mobile-friendly dropped in rank, 2.3 times as many as rose.