With the number of mobile web users soaring, you can be sure that a sizable chunk of your website’s visitors will be viewing your website on a handheld device. If you give them a good user experience, you win them over – if you fail to, they move on to the competition. The good news is that “mobilizing” your WordPress website is a painless experience.Or maybe, seeking to offer your recent layout a boost? Regardless of the reason, this bunch of public data entry website WordPress templates is the place to get started! With minimal effort, you can set up a mobile edition of your site to mobile users and forget about it; the plugin/mobile theme will handle everything.
Using plugins
There are two main ways to build a mobile-friendly WordPress site: using plugins or going for a mobile-ready (responsive) WordPress theme. Let’s look at 3 of the most popular mobile friendly WordPress plugins first.
1. WP Touch
WP Touch is a powerful plug-and-play plugin that gives you a choice of mobile-optimized themes for your mobile/tablet edition. Setting up a mobile site with this plugin is easy, with an intuitive admin interface that lets you fine-tune your options to what you think would be the best mobile experience for your website visitors. There’s also an option to allow visitors to switch back and forth between the mobile and desktop versions.
The plugin comes in two editions – the free version and WPTouch Pro, which has more customization options and themes to help you create the ultimate mobile site without sacrificing quality. Both versions will help you build mobile-friendly WordPress sites compatible with Android, iOS, Blackberry, and many others. The Pro version also supports the integration of mobile ads from ad networks like AdMob.
Summary of features:
- Plug-and-play, with many customization options
- Mobile-optimized themes
- Ajax loading and other sleek transitional effects
- Works with both mobile and tablet devices
- Image re-scaling and repositioning
- Support for mobile ads from AdSense, AdMob (Pro version)
- Fast loading of sites
- Intuitive admin interface
2. WordPress Mobile Pack
This free plugin packages everything you need to “mobilize” your WordPress website. It comes with a handy mobile switcher that allows automatic and admin – a controlled selection of themes for a range of devices. There’s also a nice admin control panel for mobile devices, allowing you to edit your website and add content on the go.
Summary of features:
- Intelligent rescaling of images
- Mobile admin interface
- Smart page/article splitting and pagination
- Mobile widgets
- Nice variety of free themes, optimized for different devices
- Automatically removes unsupported media files
3. WordPress Mobile Edition
WordPress Mobile Edition is yet another free mobile friendly WordPress plugin with a ton of options for complete control on the appearance of your mobile website. The WordPress Mobile Edition plugin relies on a mobile switcher that automatically detects the device visiting your site, and serves up the appropriate theme for it. Visitors also can switch to the desktop edition of your site with a single click. Perhaps the most unique feature of this WordPress Mobile Edition plugin is its ability to generate a mobile XML sitemap, quite useful in the SEO of your site on mobile devices.
Features summary:
- Mobile XML sitemap generator
- Mobile switcher that automatically detects and adapts to the device
- Ability to display mobile ads
- A ton of customization options, e.g. 16 color schemes to choose from
- Intelligent scaling of images and pagination of articles
- Fast and lightweight
- Full comment system, with support for Disqus
Using responsive themes
Responsive theme design has become a new trend among web developers today. The principle is simple – build once for all devices including desktops, tablets, mobile phones, large-screen displays and is proving quite effective. Luckily for you, you do not need to touch a single line of code to configure your site to adapt well across the range of devices. But you must use a responsive, aka mobile-ready theme to begin with. With that, you may never have to worry about additional mobile plugins or themes to ”mobilizing” your WordPress website.
Most themes developers for WordPress aren’t taking any chances; they are creating responsive designs. Chances are that the theme you bought sometime back has now been updated to become responsive. Many new free themes on WordPress.org are mobile-ready too.
Final Word
Your website could just do with a responsive design and display gracefully on all devices. However, you may still feel that the user experience on tablets isn’t optimal, or it isn’t quite as you’d like it to be on the iPhone. The most important thing here is testing. Try out all those plugins for ”mobilizing” your WordPress website and see which one works best for your site. You can even use one of the plugins alongside a responsive theme, just to be on the safe side.