If you haven’t been living under a rock, smartphones are taking over. There’s no stopping people from using them and they’re the consumer audience right now.
Users spend up to 40 percent of their internet time using their mobile phones. Mobile marketing strategy is shifting its focus on this juggernaut of an audience. There’s no stopping it as well.
For webmasters, you need to set your site to a mobile friendly state. This is truer if you are using WordPress sites, which comprise the majority of websites online.
Want to learn how to make WordPress mobile friendly? We have the right tips for you.
In this guide, we’ll teach you how you can get your site to work with the new algorithms favouring mobile-ready sites. We’ll even throw in some examples of successful WordPress mobile friendly blogs.
Is WordPress mobile friendly? We’ll find out.
Before we take on ways how to make WordPress mobile friendly, we need first to define what it is.
When we say a site is a mobile-ready site, it means you can view it on a mobile device without errors. Why is this important?
Google launched what we know as mobile-first indexing. This means the search engine is prioritising sites that are performing best practices.
They reference practices for mobile compatibility. They even provide extensive documentation on how they determine mobile content.
They encourage sites to provide a mobile-ready website. Google rewards performance and ranking boosts for those who comply. This rollout is tempting, considering how big the mobile user audience is growing.
WordPress sites can be mobile-ready as long as you have the right coding and plugins. All you need is a better understanding of the design. Examples of successful WordPress mobile friendly blogs will help as well.
What makes WordPress mobile friendly? It comes from the general layout and ease of use in mobile screens. They are mostly small and need more work during navigation.
There are a few factors so you can treat a site as mobile-ready. The most glaring factor is the clutter-free, clean layout that you get on your screen. The elements should fit your screen without any bugs and glitches.
Mobile-readiness means you don’t need to use horizontal scrolling. Typography should be clean and easy to read. Hyperlinks should not be hard to click as well.
WordPress sites with good mobile-readiness should load below the page load times. This happens without intrusive content.
The problem with many WordPress sites when they don’t have mobile-ready visuals. If you are a visitor, your decision to consume a website’s content is dependent on looks.
One of the most significant elements in making your WordPress mobile friendly is this. It’s responsive design.
Responsive design allows for automatic adjustments for any screen resolution. If the web designer does not know how to make WordPress mobile friendly, that’s a problem. The site will load the full desktop version.
You will only see a small area of the desktop site, which needs extensive scrolling.
There are several factors to making a responsive website for mobile use. The primary factor is understanding how to target your vital content.
Width is an issue when trying how to make WordPress mobile friendly. As it gets smaller, objects like buttons will move to a different space. Good responsive design does not skimp on the valuable content being front and center.
It’s also crucial to have responsive design that does not challenge the user. Everything needs to be easy to click and does not need clumsy navigation. If content is longer, you can hide this in other pages, a read more option or a page accordion.
Typography is among the most valuable elements in a website. When you make WordPress mobile friendly, the goal is to highlight your content. At the end of the day, people go to your site for the content that you offer.
Many mobile-ready templates will have fonts that are easy to use on mobile. They are easy on the eyes, have good kerning and have good spacing. There are also a few gold standards when you aim for something easy to use.
Text input should be at least 16 pixels. This removes the need to do manual zoom, which can test the user’s patience. Anything unimportant should run at around 12 to 14 px to show clear communication.
Remember to keep testing and use fonts that are not hard on the eyes. Sans typefaces are popular in this regard.
Also, take advantage of breaking apart texts for easy reading. Long paragraphs, as you know, need long scrolls.
If you can break this apart into groups, bulleted lists and proper spacing, the better. This can help eye tracking without too much work on the user’s part.
Images, videos, and infographics should crunch. You will see in our examples of successful WordPress mobile friendly blogs that their top priority is to crunch their multimedia information. This helps the site in a myriad of ways.
Images and videos take the most data and need the highest page load times. Optimising images to crunch smaller is useful. It allows for lower data consumption and, hence, faster loading times.
This is perfect for mobile users, who will bounce away from your slow website. This is true if your site takes more than three seconds to load.
Mobile users need information on the go. The faster they can get their fix, the more they will stay and consume.
Mobile-ready navigation is taking into consideration the possible behaviour of the consumer. In smartphones, taps are in use rather than clicks. This means there is less accuracy and nuance in every action.
Buttons should be big and easy to use. Take into consideration that thumbs will vary in size. You need your elements as thick as possible without being intrusive.
You would also want to reduce the need for entering data. At most, you want client login details only. This should be together with internal searches if possible.
Between the small key taps and intrusive auto-corrects, you want fewer fields. You also want better navigation for your WordPress sites.
The viewport is a virtual locale. It is where the browser engine determines how to scale and size your content.
In your quest on how to make WordPress mobile friendly, the viewport code is critical. It is crucial in creating a proper experience on different devices.
The viewport meta tag tells the device browser that the page wants to fit the screen. Decide on what configuration you think would work best with your website.
Is WordPress mobile friendly? It depends on how you treat your elements.
It’s understandable that you need to crunch media to make it work. You still need, however, to make sure you use high-res images for your website. Why?
User experience is far more discerning on mobile than desktop. High res images can prevent extreme pixelation or even image blur. This is true for HD or Retina OLED displays.
If you are using videos, the simplest way to take care of video content is Youtube. Not all browsers support a specific type of plugin.
Browsers take into account Youtube into their design. Creating an embed will solve this problem.
Testing is more than a tip than a factor, but it’s as crucial as anything on this list. It does not matter how gorgeous or responsive your design is. You can’t make WordPress mobile friendly without testing your components.
At the very least, test your WordPress site with two versions of Android and an iOS. The experience needs to be uniform in all systems. When you can, test your site’s performance with a low-tier, mid-tier, and a high-tier mobile phone.
Test every page, action, button, and window adjustment. Try to recreate as much of the user experience as possible.
Ask two people to test. One has design experience. The other should have zero design experience to critique the consumer journey.
People who have experience on how to make WordPress mobile friendly can help. They may provide pointers and technical tips. They would know where to poke and what possible issues to find.
People who don’t have design experience can pose as your average consumer. This will be a near-accurate representation of what actual product users may get. Let them play around and emulate common and uncommon buyer journeys.
The bottom line of making WordPress mobile friendly is this. It’s to provide the best user experience possible, period.
Now that we know how to make WordPress mobile friendly, we’re on the right track. Let’s take on a few examples of successful WordPress mobile friendly sites.
These sites are not only popular, but they’re also among the best and most mobile-ready sites out there.
My Nintendo News is the unofficial news site for anything and everything Nintendo.
From their latest console like the Switch to their latest games and releases, you’ll love them. They compile news in one easy to read portal. This is one of the great mobile-ready WordPress sites and for a reason.
The contents are neat and logical. The positioning of news tiles is responsive. They provide clear divisions on the information.
What we like about My Nintendo News, however, is their minimisations.
The site minimised its HTML and CSS. At the same time, it didn’t have images resizing all the time. This cuts down on the data and makes it smoother to access.
Is WordPress mobile friendly? If you do proper measures to minimise the code and improve responsiveness, it is.
Who better represents efficiency in web design than Windows itself? The Windows Blog is a great resource for everything that happens within Windows. Everything from new devices to updates and rollouts is here.
The Windows Blog makes WordPress mobile friendly with two crucial elements. They have a good balance of image crunching that optimises the experience. They also keep their Document Object Model (DOM) size to below 700 elements.
Both of these details are vital in user experience. The Windows Blog makes the best out of optimisation elements on making WordPress mobile friendly.
Boing Boing is one of the oldest techie sites out there. It’s an award-winning zine site of many things in pop culture.
Though it looks simplistic by modern standards, it’s one of the most responsive and best examples of successful WordPress mobile friendly blogs.
What we enjoy about Boing Boing is their bold, simplistic design and the out of the ordinary layout. Where many of the WordPress sites use the continuous tiles design, they differ. They simulate a minimal news portal layout.
Boing Boing also uses very small cookie size. They avoid duplicate resources that can affect page load times. All in all, they’re successful due to their sound fundamentals.
The Positivity Blog, as the name suggests, is a repository of many things that are good and fine on the internet. This is one of the happiest WordPress sites and their simple design reflects this. Their mantra when it comes to their mobile version.
This blog is a read through and through and relies on good readability with their mobile version. They use a simple layout, using simplistic typography and good image crunching. Their site also uses minimal DNS lookups, which prevents a direct speed penalty.
The design also prevents using tables, nested tables, and popups. These do not render in all devices. The Positivity Blog is WordPress mobile friendly. It’s a good case study.
In the pursuit to get a bigger share of an audience, websites like yours should adopt the mobile-ready experience. Proper guidance is necessary, as there is much work around how to make WordPress mobile friendly. If you get success in emulating examples of successful WordPress mobile friendly blogs, you’re bound for success.
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