How To Make Your WordPress Blog Mobile Friendly – Best Solutions
Are you looking to make your WordPress blog mobile friendly? If you have not yet thought about it, you should as Google have made mobile site an official search engine ranking factor. In this guide, I will share various options ( WordPress mobile Plugins + Themes) that you can use to make sure your WordPress blog is mobile readable and passes the Google mobile friendliness test.
Before I start sharing all the solutions, I recommend you to go to this link, add your blog URL and it will show if your website is mobile friendly or not according to Google. If it is, you don’t have to do anything, but if the result is negative, you should work right away to make your blog mobile friendly.
In this tutorial, I will explain all the solutions which you can use to make your WordPress blog mobile ready. So, lets look at the possible solutions and pick the one which you find best for your blog.
Making WordPress Blog Mobile ready:
Use a responsive theme:
If your WordPress theme is not mobile friendly, it’s not a perfect theme for your blog. Reason being is, you should not just think about mobile screen but also consider that we are living in multi-screen world. A responsive theme will ensure that your site would load perfectly on all screen size ( Smartphone, Tablets, SmartTV and any other screen type).
All the modern WordPress themes are now responsive and if your WordPress theme is not responsive,that means you are using an outdated theme. You can use any of these sites to check the responsiveness of your theme and if your result is not responsive, you should change your theme and get a responsive theme. For free themes, you can browse WordPress theme directory with responsive tag or check popular free WordPress themes and pick the one which is responsive.
If you are running a professional blog (Blog which is making money or business blog), I would recommend you to invest a bit and purchase Genesis Theme, which is the most popular premium theme and it is responsive too. What ever WordPress theme you pick, ensure that your theme is responsive.
Here are list of WordPress themes which I recommend (All are responsive)
- Genesis WordPress Themes
- Elegant Themes
- OptimizePress theme (For Sales page & membership WordPress site)
Customize responsive design for mobile:
If you are a theme developer or hiring a developer to design/develop your WordPress theme, I would suggest you to take advantage of CSS media queries for responsiveness. This is a better solution to make your responsive design more mobile friendly and this is the solution I use for my blog.
To give you an example, in a responsive design usually your sidebar and footer will show after the blog content. The fact is, many of your sidebar or footer widgets are not at all required on mobile device. Using CSS media queries, you can configure what should load on the screen based on screen-width. This way you will give a better user-experience to your mobile or tablet users. I have seen very few WordPress blogs taking advantage of this, but this gives the best user-experience to your mobile readers. You would require to spend a little extra for this solution, but it’s totally worth it. If you want to understand what I’m talking about, I would recommend you to browse www.techalive.net on your mobile phone browser.
Jetpack Plugin mobile theme:
Jetpack WordPress plugin is a great free solution to offer WordPress mobile site. You need to activate this module after activating Jetpack WordPress plugin. This plugin comes with many useful configuration option such as you can configure custom menu for your mobile site, you can decide which sidebar to load. (It can load only one sidebar, which is good for smaller screen size on mobile phones).
WPTouch WordPress plugin: (Free & paid)
WPTouch is most popular paid WordPress plugin for mobile WordPress site. It comes with free and paid version. You can download the free version from here, but if you are looking for advance option such as running ads, A/B testing ads, Google fonts for mobile site and many more, Pro version is highly recommended. The price starts at $59 for one site or $99 for 5 WordPress sites. It also offers Woo-Commerce mobile theme and many more themes to select from. Before I started using the custom responsive design for My blog, I was using paid version of WPTouch plugin.
Conclusion: What option is best to make WordPress mobile friendly?
There are many other WordPress mobile plugins and solutions out there, but you can pick any of the above solutions for your site. My suggestion is to definitely have a responsive design and if possible use CSS media queries.
If your site doesn’t look mobile friendly (Optimum user-experience) on small-screen even after using a responsive design, you should consider using WPTouch paid plugin over Jetpack plugin. If you don’t have any single penny to invest, Free WPTouch plugin or JetPack plugin is the best free solution for you.
Do remember that your role here is not just to offer mobile site, but to ensure that it increases your conversions and you should be able to monetize your mobile site with proper ad placement.
Do let me know which WordPress mobile plugin or solution you are using to make your WordPress site mobile friendly? Do share this article with other bloggers, as it will help them to make their WordPress blog mobile ready. You can share this guide on your Twitter, Facebook or Google plus.
