Mobile Friendly Checker
This free mobile friendly checker reads a page's HTML and tests the things that decide whether it works on a phone: a correct viewport meta tag, zoom not disabled, no Flash or plugin tags, no tiny font sizes or fixed-width layouts, responsive image attributes and reasonably sized tap targets. It is a heuristic HTML check, so each result says what it can and cannot prove.
Mobile Friendly Checker
Technical SEO
About this tool
Google indexes the mobile version of a page first, and most visitors to most sites arrive on a phone. A page that needs pinching to read, that spills off the screen, or whose links are too small to tap loses them in seconds. Google retired its own Mobile-Friendly Test in 2023, so site owners need another quick way to catch the basics before they look at a page on a real phone.
The checker fetches the HTML the server sends and looks for the signals that decide mobile behaviour: the viewport meta tag and whether it sets width=device-width without blocking zoom, plugin tags such as Flash that phones cannot run, font sizes below 12 pixels in inline styles and style blocks, tables and elements with fixed widths wider than a phone screen, images with srcset or sizes attributes, media queries in inline styles, links whose text is too short to tap easily, legacy font tags, and AMP or mobile-alternate links.
It cannot render the page or read external stylesheets, so it cannot measure how the layout actually looks, whether text really is legible or whether elements overlap. A page that passes every check here can still be awkward on a phone, and a page that uses external CSS for everything may trigger warnings it does not deserve. Treat the result as a checklist, then open the page on a real phone and in Chrome DevTools device mode.
Frequently asked questions
What viewport meta tag should every page have?
The standard is <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">. It tells phones to lay the page out at the screen width instead of pretending to be a 980 pixel desktop and shrinking everything. Without it, text is tiny and visitors must zoom to read.
Is it bad to disable zooming with user-scalable=no?
Yes. It stops people with poor eyesight enlarging text and is an accessibility failure under WCAG. Modern iOS ignores it anyway. Remove user-scalable=no and maximum-scale=1 unless the page is a full-screen app with its own zoom controls.
What happened to Google's Mobile-Friendly Test?
Google shut it down in December 2023, along with the mobile usability report in Search Console. Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools and PageSpeed Insights still report mobile problems such as viewport, font size and tap targets, and this checker covers the HTML-level basics for a quick first look.
What size should tap targets be?
At least 48 by 48 CSS pixels with about 8 pixels of space between them, so a fingertip hits one link and not its neighbour. Navigation lists of tightly packed links and icon-only links are the usual offenders. Padding on the link, not just the text, makes the target bigger without changing the look.
Why does the checker not show how the page looks on a phone?
Because it reads the HTML without rendering it or downloading stylesheets, which keeps the check fast and safe but means it cannot see the final layout. For a visual check, open the page in Chrome, press F12, toggle the device toolbar and pick a phone, or simply open it on your own phone.