Viewport Meta Tag not set

Last updated:

Impact: CRITICAL
This evaluation is included in the Mobile Friendly test offered by ExcellentWebCheck. Ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly and responsive is crucial not only for enhancing the user experience but also for optimizing your site's SEO performance.

Why is a viewport meta tag important?

The <meta name="viewport" /> in the <head> tells the browser how the page should be rendered. The viewport communicates how the page should be scaled and sized to fit the screen of the device. For a responsive website it is necessary to set the <meta name="viewport" />.

How to fix issue “A Viewport Meta Tag must be set”?

Add a meta viewport tag to the <head> of your html page:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />

 

Note: you are supposed to have only one meta viewport tag!

What does this code do?

  1. width=device-width: this tells the browser that the width of the page should be set to the width of the device-width. A phone that has a width of 360px renders a page with ~360px of width.
  2. initial-scale=1.0: sets the initial zoom level. This allows the user to zoom in.

It is important to set a viewport that allows zooming to allow people with low vision to zoom in. Therefore we recommend to not add other scale parameters to the viewport meta tag.

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