Is your website usable on a phone?
Most of your visitors are on a phone, and Google now judges your site primarily by its mobile version. One missing line in your HTML is the difference between a readable site and a shrunken desktop page nobody can tap.
Check my mobile setup
Enter your website address. We run the check against your live site and show you this section of the results in a few seconds.
Checks run against your live site. We record the website address you check, the pass, warn and fail counts, and your email address. We use your email to run the check, and to send marketing only if you tick the box. We do not sell, rent or share your details. Ten free scans per hour.
What this checks
- Mobile viewportWithout this tag, your site renders zoomed-out on phones. Google penalises it.
Why it matters
The viewport meta tag tells a phone browser to render your page at the phone's own width. Without it, the phone assumes it is dealing with a desktop site, renders it about a thousand pixels wide, and scales the whole thing down to fit. Your text arrives unreadably small and every button is a pinch and a zoom away.
Google has indexed the mobile version of sites as the primary version for years. A site that fails on a phone is not penalised in some abstract way, it is simply judged on the version that does not work.
The tag itself is one line. If it is missing, that is usually a signal worth following, because it tends to mean the site predates responsive design or was built from a desktop-only template, and the rest of the layout will have the same problem.
How to fix it
Add the viewport tag
A single meta tag in the head of every page, setting width to device-width and the initial scale to 1. Every modern template includes it. If yours does not, that is the first thing to fix.
Never disable zoom
Adding user-scalable=no or capping maximum-scale stops people pinching to zoom. It is a genuine accessibility failure under WCAG, and it is the kind of thing that turns up in a complaint.
Check your tap targets
Anything tappable wants to be at least 44 by 44 pixels with space around it. Links crammed together in a row are nearly impossible to hit accurately on a phone.
Keep body text at 16 pixels or more
Below that, phone browsers may zoom the page when somebody focuses a form field, which produces the horizontal scrolling that makes a form feel broken.
Questions
- Is a viewport tag all it takes to be mobile friendly?
- No. It is the prerequisite. Without it nothing else can work, because the page is being scaled down wholesale. With it, the quality of your layout, tap targets and font sizes decides the rest.
- Google retired its Mobile-Friendly Test tool. Does that mean it stopped mattering?
- The opposite. Google retired the standalone tool because mobile is now simply how the web is measured rather than a special case, and the reporting moved into Search Console. The underlying requirement did not relax.
- My site has a separate mobile version on m.mysite.com. Is that fine?
- It works, but it is the old approach and it doubles your maintenance, your content and your SEO surface. One responsive site is easier to run and is what Google expects now.
The other seven checks
Each one is free, instant and needs just your email address. Or run all 25 at once.
A missing viewport tag is rarely the only thing
The free check tells you what is broken. The audit is a dated report, tested by a person, that shows what was checked and when. That record is what protects you when somebody complains, and it is the part an automated scan cannot give you.
This is an automated check of what is publicly visible on your website. It is a plain language summary, not legal advice, and passing it does not by itself make you compliant with any particular law. Where a rule is mentioned, confirm it against the source before acting on it.