Google Says Mobile & Desktop Pages Don’t Have To Match Exactly But They Must Fulfill The Same Purpose

Google’s John Mueller said again that your desktop pages and mobile pages do not need to match exactly. But what they really need to do is “fulfill the same purpose.” He said the mobile and desktop “pages don’t have to be exactly the same.”

John gave this example, “having 16 items on desktop and 8 on mobile doesn’t matter, as long as pagination still works in one form or another.”

Here are those tweets so you see the specific context:

As long as it still works on mobile, that’s fine. Pages don’t have to be exactly the same, they should just fulfill the same purpose. For example, having 16 items on desktop and 8 on mobile doesn’t matter, as long as pagination still works in one form or another.

— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) August 20, 2021

So you really want to make sure both your desktop and mobile users have the best user experience that leads them to fulfilling the purpose of that specific page they are on.

Forum discussion at Twitter.