The viewport meta tag: Crawl Audit check 101

Short answer: without a viewport meta tag, phones draw your page as if on a desktop screen, then shrink it to fit, so the text is tiny. One line in the <head> fixes it. Check 101 fails when the tag is missing. Google indexes the mobile version of your site, so this matters for search as well as visitors.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: a <meta name="viewport"> with a value. The report shows it.
• Fail: none.

What the sources say

• MDN: some devices "render pages in a virtual window or viewport that is wider than the screen, and then shrink the rendered result down to fit the screen size."
• web.dev: "A page without the viewport meta tag loads very zoomed out, making the text hard to read."
• Google: "Google uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking."

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

Leave out maximum-scale=1 and user-scalable=no. They stop people zooming (check 102).

On your platform

• WordPress: block themes get the tag from WordPress itself; classic themes include it in their header.
• Shopify: themes include it. Dawn's layout has width=device-width,initial-scale=1.
• Next.js: added by default, as width=device-width, initial-scale=1. Its docs say "the default is sufficient".

On devmarde.com

Our pages carry width=device-width, initial-scale=1, the Next.js default.

Sources

• MDN, <meta name="viewport">, checked 6 October 2026.
• web.dev, Responsive web design basics; Google Search Central, Mobile-first indexing (updated 10 December 2025).
• Next.js, generateViewport.