Is Your Website's Viewport Configured for Mobile Users? Here's How to Do It

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You're out with friends, laughing, having a grand old time -- when someone asks the group a total brainteaser: "Why don't 'B' batteries exist?" You're stumped. You whip out your smartphone and type the question into the Google machine.

And boom: Up pops a battery company's blog post on the nationally uniform specifications for the size of battery cells. But here's the thing: The content on the website is loading as if you're looking at the site on the desktop.

In other words, the font and pictures are really tiny, and you're finding you have to zoom in and scroll back and forth to read and interact with the content.

What's a Viewport? rnrn rnrn A website's viewport controls the width of a webpage for the device a user is viewing it on.

If you don't configure your website's viewport properly, you're dooming your mobile visitors to several, frustrating minutes of pinching and zooming. (That is, if they even choose to stay on your site.) And trust me, that's probably a lot of your website visitors, seeing as mobile search queries have already begun to surpass desktop.

Even if you're using responsive design, you'll need to configure your viewport in order to offer a good experience to your mobile visitors.

But first, let's get a little better of an understanding of how viewports work and what they look like.rnrn What Your Site Looks Like With a Viewport vs.

Without rnrn When you don't set a viewport for mobile devices, those devices will render a webpage at the width of a typical desktop screen and then scale to fit the screen so that the text and graphics are super small.

This is called the "fallback width," and it ranges from 800–1024 pixels.rnrn rnrn When you do set a viewport for mobile devices, the webpage's width will scale automatically to a user's mobile device, giving them a much better experience.

Below, the screen on the left doesn't have a viewport configured, so the mobile browser assumes desktop width.

The screen on the right does have a viewport configured, so the mobile browser knows to match the device width and scale the page so the content's easily readable.rnrn rnrnImage Credit: Google Developers rnrn rnrn First, Check to See If You Have A Viewport Configured Already rnrn rnrn To check, go to the Google Mobile Ready Check website .

Paste your URL into the empty field and hit "Submit" at the bottom. The tool will run your website through Google's mobile-friendly test, and if your viewport is not configured, it will tell you.

If your viewport isn't set up, keep reading.rnrn How to Configure Your Website's Viewport rnTo configure a mobile viewport, all you have to do is add a meta viewport tag to any and all webpages you would like to be mobile-friendly.

To do this, simply copy the HTML snippet below and paste it in the header of your site.rnrn rnrnIn many cases, placing this viewport tag in the header file will have the viewport carry across the whole site, making your entire website more mobile-friendly.

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