Question 1

Does Google penalise non-mobile-friendly websites?

Accepted Answer

Google moved to mobile-first indexing for all websites in 2024, meaning Google primarily uses the mobile version of your site for crawling, indexing, and ranking. Sites that are not mobile-friendly face ranking disadvantages because Google evaluates content, structured data, and signals from the mobile version. Additionally, mobile usability is a component of the Page Experience ranking signals. Non-mobile-friendly pages — those with tiny text, content wider than the screen, or unclickable buttons — will underperform in rankings compared to responsive alternatives.

Question 2

What viewport meta tag makes a page mobile-friendly?

Accepted Answer

The standard viewport meta tag for mobile-friendliness is: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">. This tells the browser to match the screen width and set the initial zoom to 100%. Without this tag, mobile browsers render pages at desktop width (typically 980px) and then scale them down, making text tiny and elements difficult to tap. Do not use maximum-scale=1 or user-scalable=no as these prevent users from zooming and are considered a mobile usability issue by Google.

Mobile-Friendly Test

What gets checked