We are a part of a constantly growing world,where each step marks the advancement of technology. There was a time when one couldn’t imagine mobile phones,but now,we access almost all the information about the world on our mobile phones.
According to recent data research,around half of the internet traffic is due to mobile phones’ usage. It indeed is one’s companion for google searches,blogging,research work,and publishing,etc. It is continuously evolving,and the users are continuously increasing. This is the reason why even Google punishes you if you do not have a mobile version of your website.
Every webpage or website that you launch,you do that with the target of hitting the maximum audience. Now,as we already know that more than half of the audience will be accessing it through mobile devices,it is no less than a compulsion to keep this in mind and launch your project accordingly.
When we talk about making the website mobile-friendly,the work doesn’t end at just installing a responsive theme. It is,in fact,the beginning of the work. This article will serve as a guide to you for making your WordPress website mobile-friendly. We will be breaking it into elements through which you can scroll and make changes to your project. So,let’s explore!
1. Implement a Mobile version of the website
The screen sizes of mobile phones vary among each other and differ from the desktop screen. Hence,a website must be designed in a way that its elements reshuffle as the viewports grow and shrink. This is called responsive design. Among many other advantages,its major plus point is that it offers a hustle free branding opportunity to the developers. Using a responsive theme,you can manage different themes by just controlling one.
Now you can either design a new website with a responsive theme,you can test and see if the developer has updated functionality by adding a responsive theme to your existing website,or you can create your responsive theme using a variety of Plugins offered by WordPress.
For case one,for all the modern themes,WordPress already provides an updated version with responsive themes,so if you are just going to create a new website,you do not have to worry. Besides this,WordPress offers a range of plugins to allow you to create a responsive theme. Below are some of them. You can explore these and choose one for your website.
- WP Touch
- WordPress Mobile Pack
- JetPack
- Any Mobile Theme Switcher
- WP Mobile Edition
Also,if you will be catering to a lot of traffic,you can consider making a mobile app for your website. You can go through the WP Rest API to work on building an app.
2. Using Mobile Optimized Plugins
WordPress gives a plethora of plugins that can make your work easy. But before choosing any of those,you must make sure that it works for mobile as well.
For selecting a theme,you can first do preliminary research for it. You can read reviews,make some test runs in a local testing environment. Below are a few of the tested plugins that work well for mobiles.
- Responsive Menu
- Gravity Forms
- Contact Form 7
- Responsive Sliders
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3. Optimizing Images
Images take up most of the data on a website. Hence image optimization,especially for mobile websites is extremely necessary.
If you are still using an older version of WordPress,update it. It already comes with consideration for image optimization. Most of your work will be done just by updating WordPress. Apart from updating your version,you can do many other things for image optimization,which will increase the usability of mobile versions.
You can use Save for Web feature of Photoshop to create the smallest possible version of the image. If you do not use photoshop,you can service like TinyPNG to do the same. You can also compress the image using Plugins. Popularly used ones are WP Smush or EWWW Image Optimiser.
4. Speeding up on Mobile
Time taken while loading a page,decides the usability of the website to a great extent. Hence it is always advised to decrease the responsive time of the website and make it work fast. Over 40% of the users leave the site quickly if the page doesn’t load within three seconds.
To gain useful insights on loading websites faster,you can go through resources like Pingdom,GT Matrix. You can also consider looking into Accelerated Mobile Pages. They make your pages load quickly in Google search results. You can install this in WordPress using AMP Plugin.
5. Full-Screen Pop-Ups
Whether it is a mobile phone or a desktop screen,we all hate pop-ups. They make us go through unnecessary pages and waste our time. While it may be necessary,try to avoid making full-screen pop-ups. Even Google recommends using banners,text links,and CTAs in the content to avoid annoying pop-ups.
6. Mobile-Friendly Test and Website Administration via Mobile
After implementing the measures mentioned above,it is time to take a test run. This will work as a prototype testing for the website,and you can work where your website lacks. To make your job easy,Google has created a nifty Mobile Friendliness Testing Tool. It will test your website for all the aspects that might be encountered with mobile activity.
Now that you have managed all the frontend job,you should look back at the backend. After all,backend makes your front end work efficiently. Luckily,WordPress gives its user a gift of taking care of backend processes. WordPress backend is completely mobile responsive and it makes your website work just as well.
Summarising What We’ve Learned
Making your websites mobile-friendly will increase your reach to maximum users. It will also give you the liberty to access and manage it through mobile.
While we have gone through many aspects,updated versions,plugins,and optimization of content are the holding threads of a website. WordPress already takes care of many of the features,and thus reduces a lot of your work. Make sure you utilize the available resources to the most and enhance your website’s level with the availability of every new version.
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