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:

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.