More than half of all Google searches are conducted on mobile devices, and for several advertisers, mobile users account for the majority of traffic. With the small handy gadget being the all-time companion of its users, the best way to engage, delight, and retain your visitor is by making a mobile-friendly website.
WordPress is one of the most convenient CMS, holding a major share of the market. Due to its robust CMS, a plethora of eCommerce retailers, businesses, organizations, and individuals have adopted WordPress to build their websites.
Apart from a large range of themes, WordPress also offers some powerful plugins to optimize your WordPress website. Undoubtedly, website speed matters for a seamless user experience, and when it comes to mobile versions, speed matters even more.
This article explores how you can make your WordPress website mobile friendly and engage a larger user base.
Why are mobile-friendly sites important?
- User Experience: A majority of internet users now access websites using their mobile devices, and a mobile-friendly website provides a better user experience to these visitors. It makes it easier for them to navigate, read content, and interact with your website on the small screens of their devices.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Search engines like Google favor mobile-friendly websites in their search results. Having a mobile-friendly website can help improve your website’s ranking and visibility in search results.
- Increased Conversion Rates: A mobile-friendly website can help improve conversion rates by making it easier for users to complete actions such as making a purchase or filling out a form. A good mobile experience can also increase customer loyalty and repeat visits.
- Improved Accessibility: Mobile-friendly websites can improve accessibility for users with disabilities, as they allow users to access content and functionality on smaller screens with ease.
How to make your WordPress Website Mobile Friendly?
1. Execute a Responsive Mobile Version of Your Website
- Use CSS media queries to define different styles for different screen sizes.
- Make sure the site’s layout and content are optimized for smaller screens.
- Use a flexible grid system to adjust the layout based on the screen size.
- Use a responsive image solution to ensure images scale correctly on different devices.
- Test the website on various devices to make sure it looks and works correctly.
Note: It’s important to keep in mind that creating a responsive website requires a solid understanding of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
2. Consider Incorporating Google AMP for WordPress
AMP refers to Accelerated Mobile Pages. It’s a Google-backed attempt to reduce the amount of data required to load a page on a mobile device. On using Google mobile search, you can see websites with the AMP label.
One of the biggest advantages of Google AMP for WordPress, is that the code is simplified, making Google AMP pages blazingly fast and responsive. Therefore, AMP is an excellent alternative if you want to easily make your WordPress site mobile-friendly.
Setting up Google AMP for WordPress is also really simple. You can even do it with the aid of an Official AMP plugin. This plugin has contributors like Google, Automattic, and XWP.
The AMP plugin installation and activation are essentially all that is required. After that, Google will start delivering AMP content to mobile phone users via your website.
If you are seeking other options, then AMP for WP plugin is a great choice if you’d like more control over how your WordPress AMP content appears. With new styling options, options for including ads, and options for social sharing buttons, it improves upon the official AMP plugin:
The following two points are crucial to take into account if you’re worried about how your Google AMP WordPress pages may affect your SEO:
- You won’t face any duplicate content penalties because the AMP plugin automatically applies rel=”canonical” tags to your AMP content.
- Yoast SEO is well connected with the Official AMP Plugin, making SEO easier.
3. Utilize Mobile-Optimized Plugins
Plugins enhance the look and feel of WordPress websites by adding features and functionality. While plugins can provide your website with better designs and components like a call to action or widget button, using the right plugins helps them function seamlessly on mobile devices as well. It gives you a choice to disable certain elements on lower screen sizes or scale well across all screen sizes.
4. Don’t use Flash
Flash on your website will make it slower, impacting SEO and user experience. It can make a page take longer to load and is completely incompatible with mobile devices. Using HTML5 and CSS instead can make your website more responsive and mobile-friendly.
5. Keep content on mobile and desktop sites the same
Google’s mobile-first indexing will lead your site to lose traffic if your mobile site contains less information than your desktop site. Therefore, ensure that the descriptive titles, metadata, and structured data on your desktop and mobile sites are similar. Google advises using the same text, file names, captions, and evocative alt text for mobile and desktop.
Nevertheless, what if your desktop site contains a lot of content, but it’s impossible to fit it on a mobile device’s tiny screen?
Do not remove any content. Instead, use accordions, drop-down menus, or tabs to be more inventive in terms of mobile-friendly design. Make sure to test your site to check on this criterion. Using a mobile friendly website tester to ensure the website is responsive should be your next step.
6. Simplify on-site graphics
Large image files or an excessive amount of graphics might occupy valuable webpage space and detract from the message of the text. Additionally, images and graphics are a significant contributor to delayed page loads, causing a bad user experience on your mobile websites.
For your websites to automatically provide the smallest pictures and graphics based on screen size and device specifications, use the most recent version of WordPress and WordPress themes.
Using Lazy Loading of Images in JavaScript can also help in making WordPress websites faster, as it loads images on a web page only when required. This way can improve the page’s loading time without reducing the page size.
How to take the mobile-friendly test for your WordPress website?
While your website might appear nice on one of the mobile devices, it might not be on another. Since different mobile devices vary in terms of screen size and resolution, it is essential to test on various devices for better mobile-friendliness of the website.
Using BrowserStack Responsive Checker Tool, you can check how your WordPress Website renders on different screen sizes and resolutions by selecting devices of your choice from the real device cloud.