BasicSEO: highInside <head>

meta viewport

Controls how a page scales and displays on mobile devices — required for mobile-friendly status and Core Web Vitals.

The viewport meta tag tells mobile browsers how to scale and render the page. Without it, mobile browsers render the page at desktop width (typically 980px) and then scale it down, making text tiny. Google uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal and runs mobile-first indexing — the mobile version of your page is what gets indexed.

The standard value "width=device-width, initial-scale=1" is correct for virtually every responsive site. It sets the viewport width to the device width and prevents initial zoom. Do not set user-scalable=no as this harms accessibility (violates WCAG guidelines) and some browsers now ignore it anyway.

If you are building a responsive design with CSS media queries, this meta tag is a prerequisite — without it, the media queries will not trigger correctly on mobile browsers. Google's Mobile-Friendly Test and Lighthouse both check for this tag.

HTML Example

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Attributes

widthSet to "device-width" for responsive layouts. Can be a pixel value (e.g., "640") for fixed-width sites.
initial-scaleThe initial zoom level. "1" means no zoom — the page fills the device width.
maximum-scaleLimits user zoom. Avoid setting this — it harms accessibility.
Check this tag on your site
Audit your meta viewport implementation on any URL
Mobile Friendly Test →

Related Tags

meta robots
Directives that control how search engines index the page and fol…
<title>
The HTML title element defines the page title shown in browser ta…
← All Meta Tags