Responsive design not working on Blogger?
Google search reports an error about blogger site: Text too small to read...
This happened to us here on this blog, not long ago. We were using one of Bloggers preset themes, which are designed to be responsive to various screen sizes, but it just wasn’t working correctly, and Google analytics was reporting issues on an increasing number of pages.
We first tried switching to a different theme - after all, Blogger provides a lot of them, for free, and they’re pretty versatile. No luck - the text still wasn’t wrapping correctly and the scale was way off for some elements.
So we went looking for a commercially offered scheme that would do what we wanted, not require much tweaking to set up, and looked good. We found one, doesn’t really matter which, as I think they’d all work for this, installed it, and spent some time trying to get it set up. For the product we’d chosen, that was less intuitive then it could have been, so we decided to just put the old one back for now, read the instructions in greater depth, and come back to it later.
When we went to put the old theme back, the usual ‘Apply’ button was gone, and in its place was a button labelled ‘Upload.’ We clicked anyway, and surprisingly the 'Upload' acted like 'Apply' and was perfect. The process from there was the same as if we were just switching between the preloaded templates. Once the old theme was in place though (no tweaking at all was required, it just installed cleanly) the old theme worked perfectly. It displayed well on all the screen sizes we tested it on, and when we tested it with Google Analytics, it passed with no issues.
All this happened in blogger legacy mode by the way.
Recap
These are the error messages google had been giving us about the blogger pages:
- text too small to read
- clickable elements too close together
- viewport not set to "device-width"
After the upload, the old blogger theme was fully responsive, and all the issues reported by Google were quickly retested and confirmed resolved.
FWIW, just changing between themes doesn’t have the same effect. We did try that first, and I’ve tried it on other blogs. I’ve not been able to get he upload theme button to appear by any other means then going through the process above, and it was definitely the uploading of the alternate theme that was the essential step.
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