We all know that, it is very important to make our website mobile friendly. Mobile users are growing every day. Those users access the internet using their mobile devices. It is necessary to make our WordPress website look good on smaller screens.
For WordPress, its large plugin and theme library can be used to make our blog look good on every device. There are plugins which change the look of your website when it is viewed from a mobile device. Additionally, there are themes which are responsive and they adjust their width and content according to the size of the device. These auto adaptive features help us to configure our blog for mobile phones and tablets.
Here are a couple of tips to make our WordPress website or blog mobile friendly:
1. Using Responsive Templates
The best way to make sure that our blog template looks perfect on every device of every dimension is by using responsive templates. These responsive templates have dynamic width. Elements in these templates fix their position and width according to the maximum width of a device. You will no longer have to worry about your website not fitting properly. Responsive templates do all the magic.
So, it is highly recommended that you adapt your blog template to be responsive. You can either change your template or modify your current one to be fluid in design. You also should test the implemented responsiveness on different screen sizes, just to make sure. Firefox browser’s responsive design view option comes in handy for testing.
2. Jetpack
We know that Jetpack comes with tons of tools that are quite useful for WordPress. You probably have this plugin installed in your self-hosted WordPress blog. One of its features is “Mobile Theme”. If you turn this option on, WordPress will automatically recognize mobile devices and activate a mobile theme.
You can also configure mobile theme options to make it use excerpts or show full posts. This is one of the quickest ways to make your website mobile friendly.
3. WPtouch
WPtouch is a plugin for WordPress. After you install and activate it, a simple and elegant mobile template is automatically activated for your blog. The next time your visitors access your website from a mobile device, your website will have an elegant mobile theme which is touch friendly.
WPtouch is also highly configurable. You can change several of its aspects like who will see the theme. You can also choose between five different themes that this plugin offers. There are also several other configuration options related to display, commenting, transitions, menus etc.
Other Plugins
4. WP Mobile Detector Mobile Plugin
This is a plugin for WordPress which automatically activates when your blog is accessed from a mobile device. It changes the template to something that fits well for a small screen. Your sidebar widgets, advertisements etc. are also kept by this mobile detector plugin.
This plugin implements a slide in menu from where all your sidebar contents can be accessed. When this menu component is not active, your posts are displayed in a normal manner. You also have a few configuration options related to dashboard widget, mobile/tablet device and statistics.
5. MobilePress
MobilePress is another plugin which can detect a mobile device automatically. It also activates a mobile friendly template for mobile devices.
You can configure options like what to display in the front page, things to include like categories, pages, post thumbnails and post tags. There are also other useful settings related to displaying of comments.