Your page shows up tiny on phones

Applies to

every page

Typical severity

critical

Effect on conversions

medium

Effort to fix

Quick to fix

What to look for

Missing meta viewport.

Why it matters

Without a viewport tag, a phone assumes your page was built for a desktop screen. It renders the page at a desktop width, around 980px, and shrinks the whole thing to fit. Text becomes tiny and people have to pinch and zoom to read anything.

Most visitors to small business sites arrive on a phone. If the first thing they see is a miniature desktop page, many will leave before reading a word. Google also uses the mobile version of your page for indexing, so a page that doesn't work on phones is at a disadvantage in search.

What good looks like

The page has a meta viewport tag in its head. We check that the tag exists. The standard value is width=device-width, initial-scale=1, which tells the browser to use the phone's real width and not to zoom out.

How to check it yourself

1. Open the page in your browser and view the source (Ctrl+U, or Cmd+Option+U on a Mac).
2. Search the source for the word viewport.
3. You should see a line like the code example below near the top, inside the head section.
4. Open the page on a phone. If it looks like a shrunk desktop site and you need to zoom to read, the tag is missing or wrong.

How to fix it

• Add the tag inside the head of every page, ideally in your shared template or theme header so all pages get it.
• Most website builders and themes add it for you. If yours doesn't, look for a setting for custom head code.
• Once it's in, check the page on a phone. If the layout now overflows sideways, the page needs responsive CSS as well. See the sideways scrolling check.

<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  <title>...</title>
</head>

Common mistakes

• Adding maximum-scale=1 or user-scalable=no. This stops people zooming in, which fails WCAG 1.4.4 and frustrates anyone who needs larger text.
• Setting a fixed width such as width=1024.
• Adding the tag to the home page only, not to every template.

AgoraScan measures this automatically on every page it audits, on desktop and mobile.

Based on

• Google Search Central