Viewport meta tag is present and correctly configured
Why it matters
Without a viewport meta tag, mobile browsers render the page at a hardcoded desktop width of roughly 980px and scale it down to fit the screen. Text becomes unreadably small, tap targets shrink below usable size, and pinch-zoom becomes the only way to interact. Search engines treat this as a mobile-unfriendly signal, demoting rankings under Google's mobile-first indexing. More than half of global traffic is mobile — a missing viewport tag breaks the primary user experience and kills SEO.
Severity rationale
Critical because a single missing line breaks the mobile experience for every visitor and tanks mobile search rankings.
Remediation
Add the viewport meta tag to your root HTML head, or in Next.js App Router export generateViewport from your root app/layout.tsx. The two required properties are width=device-width and initial-scale=1.
export function generateViewport() {
return { width: 'device-width', initialScale: 1 }
}
DetectionPro
The detection method for this pattern is part of AuditBuffet Pro.
The full method (what to look for, pass and fail conditions, and how results get reported) ships inside the Mobile Responsiveness Audit. The pattern definition, severity rationale, and remediation remain openly licensed under CC-BY-4.0.
External references
- wcag:2.2 · 1.4.4 — Resize Text
Taxons
History
- 2026-04-18·v1.0.0·Initial import from mobile-responsiveness·automated