Mobile-friendly website test

Why mobile-friendly matters to Google

Google indexes the mobile version of a page. This is called mobile-first indexing: when Google decides what a page says and where it ranks, it reads what a phone is sent. If a phone gets less than a computer, Google sees less.

Google's guide to mobile-first indexing asks for the same thing on both versions: "Make sure that your mobile site contains the same content as your desktop site," with the same structured data, equivalent titles and descriptions, and the same robots meta tags (Google: mobile-first indexing best practices).

Google retired its own Mobile-Friendly Test on 1 December 2023 and now points people to Lighthouse. This test is ours. It checks the two things a server's HTML can tell you, and links to the tools that measure the rest.

What this test checks

• The viewport tag. Without <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"> a phone shows the page at computer width, shrunk to fit. This is the audit's own viewport check.
• Zoom. A viewport tag with user-scalable=no, or a maximum zoom under 2, stops people enlarging small text.
• The same page on a phone and a computer. We request the page twice, as a phone and as a computer, and compare the address, title, meta description, robots tag, main heading, structured data and amount of text.

Speed on a phone is a separate question: the page speed test asks Google's PageSpeed Insights for real visitors' Core Web Vitals. Whether buttons are big enough to tap and text is big enough to read depends on how the page is drawn on a screen, so check those on your own phone.

Next: test the page's speed, or check its title and meta tags.