Adding Viewport Meta Tag via WordPress Theme Functions

Add the viewport meta tag with a WordPress hook via your theme’s functions file to allow responsive web design and mobile-friendly themes

meta-viewport-thumbWith all the responsive web design activity over the past few years, I hope that any theme or site we work on we’re able to make responsive to some extent. An important part of making a web site responsive is adding a viewport meta tag to your html. Without explicitly stating our viewport, the mobile browsers will scale down the website to fit into their ‘viewport’. This is a good thing, since if it was a full website and the browser didn’t scale it down, you’d only see the top left corner, or some small section of the site. This viewport was introduced by apple for iOS and has spread to most mobile devices since. There are viewport properties or parameters we can set with this meta tag such as width and scale and can even use some device aware variables (like ‘device-width’) to set these values.

A WordPress Meta Viewport Hook

I usually end up using the following hook to add a viewport meta tag to my head in wordpress. I set the viewport width to match the width of the device. Then I set the initial scale to 1. Some go and set the maximum-scale to 1 as well. This would prevent users from zooming in on your site. I advocate that we should allow users to zoom if they wish since it is a gesture they may be used to and may still need (no matter how nice your RWD is, they may need/want to see it bigger). RWD is about giving the user a better layout for whatever device they are on, not restricting how they view it.

[cc lang=”php”]
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Add viewport meta tag to head
//
function viewport_meta() {
?>

4 thoughts on “Adding Viewport Meta Tag via WordPress Theme Functions

  1. can you please show an example of the page that were supposed to add it to? like is it header.php and its it right before the end if right before the body tag starts?

    1. You add this tag in the head section of your html, normally that would be in the header.php file. But this script I’m mentioning here would go in your functions.php file. It will then insert the viewport tag into your html head for you.

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