9 Steps to a Mobile-Friendly WordPress Site
Mobile has become an essential platform for a number of business owners to showcase their product and services through a business application. These app based services reach an extended audience and therefore it is more important than ever to let your website go mobile-friendly. How to take any WordPress site and make a mobile version of it that will load on all smart phones. There are 2 main reasons why this walk through is useful. The 1st one is if you currently have a theme that is not mobile friendly which creates a bad viewing experience when on a smart phone. The other reason would be if you have a responsive site but want more control over how it looks on all mobile phones.
Developing a mobile-friendly website is profitable in a number of ways. Here is a detailed guide on how to optimize your WordPress website for mobile visitors.
1) Find the right hosting plan
Picking the right hosting plan is the foremost requirement that should be addressed when trying to optimize your WordPress website. For this purpose, choose a reliable hosting company. Make sure your website is not shared over a common server as it can slow down the loading speed. Thus, beware of cheap hosting plans and choose the services of a company that offers economical and quality hosting services. Ensure that the hired company is efficiently handling web traffic towards your site.
2) Get A Responsive Theme
Select a perfect WordPress theme for your responsive website should be a top priority. You need to look for themes that are lightweight and can upload easily over major browsers. Mobile theme to use when viewing site on smart phone. Install it. Make sure what ever theme you choose allows for you to put custom CSS code directly into the theme options.
3) Install Theme
Install Theme Test Drive and Mobile Smart or Mobile Smart Pro plugins.
4) Make the content adaptive
The content can be made adaptive by creating alternatives such as short titles. Moreover, content type such as infographics may prove to be meaningless content for mobile simply because of the size of the screen. In such cases, it is advised not to deliver the content at all. If you wish to add any content display, add the content carefully by making it short and catchy.
5) Monitor your plugins
The more plugins on your WordPress website, the more performance issues may occur. Thus, it is important to install the plugins after performing thorough research. A number of plugins can slow down the speed of a WordPress website, which is always a loss for the website owner. Plugins slow down the speed of the website because of the bad coding and installation of outdated versions.
6) Optimize images for the website
Having images throughout your website enable users to remain interested in the content. It keeps the content from looking dull and boring and helps to share the article more frequently. Make use of plugins to optimize images over the websites. It won’t hurt the speed of the website. Uploading the right plugin for image optimization purposes ensures that images will only be uploaded when the required area over the phone becomes visible to the users. It helps to reduce the page load time offering satisfied user experience.
7) Setup mobile menu
The free version of WPtouch provides the essential option of specifying a menu for use on mobile devices and I would urge you to do so (after having first thought about what content is most important for your mobile visitors, of course!).
Create a new menu in the usual WordPress way (Appearance > Menus). Give it an obvious name, such as Mobile Menu and then in the WPtouch Menus settings page, select the mobile menu from the drop down list and check Menu Options as appropriate (check it if you are unsure).
8) Go through the testing phase
After performing all the above-mentioned tasks, you then have to test the website for its performance. It is not wise to trust your code and responsive design without first testing everything; undergoing testing will help to ensure flawless performance. You can test the performance of your website by running it on several mobile devices. This will help you to notice the performance of the website and its appearance on different devices.
9) Add Bookmark Icons
When a visitor bookmarks your website, it potentially adds an icon to their home screen. If you don’t provide an icon the device will either use a default icon or take a screengrab neither of which is going to make your site’s icon easy to find or help with your branding.
Create two icons, one for Android (96×96 pixels) and one for iOS (120×120 pixels) both in the png format and upload them on the WPtouch > Theme Settings > Bookmark Icons options page. You can also override the site title here if you want to (perhaps if it is overly long).
