If you think that mobile internet use is the future of online activity, you’re right. But you should know – the future is now!
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you might be missing out on making connections and sales no matter how great your product, service, or resource is. Fortunately, if you use WordPress to host your site, there are some easy and effective ways to make sure that your site ranks in searches, reaches out to new visitors, and rakes in return visits.
In this article, we will review the following key points:
1- Why You Should Make Your WordPress Website Mobile Friendly
2- How to Make Your WordPress Website Mobile Friendly
3- The Benefits of Having a Mobile-Friendly WordPress Website
It’s what web users demand. It’s easy to do (if you take advantage of the resources WordPress makes available). You’ll see a difference in your results immediately. So, why not take advantage?
Why Should You Make Your WordPress Website Mobile Responsive?
It can be hard to generate traffic for your website and it can be just as hard to get quality interactions with the visitors to your site once they’re there. Even if you’ve gotten the best advice and done all the hard work to design and layout your page and optimize the content for SEO, you still might not be getting the results you’re hoping for!
If you’re putting all or most of your efforts into the way your site looks and functions on a desktop, you’re probably missing out on a great opportunity to connect. Here are some facts:
1- In 2015, “Google implemented a major overhaul of its search algorithm to reward sites that are deemed ‘mobile-friendly’”.
2- In November of 2016, “mobile usage surpassed desktop usage on Black Friday for the first time in history”.
3- It’s estimated that “by 2020, 90% of the world’s population over the age of six will have a mobile phone”.
Here are three things to consider if you’re on the fence about making your WordPress website mobile-friendly:
- Google Rankings: Your website will rank higher in search results because Google just likes sites that are mobile responsive better.
- The Five-Second Rule: No, not that one! This has nothing to do with whether to eat something you dropped on the floor.
Experts agree that your site has less than five seconds to make a positive first impression on a visitor. If they are visiting on a mobile device and your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re fighting an uphill battle. - User Experience: Once you’ve gotten people to your site and captured their attention, what are you going to do with it? A mobile responsive site will look so much better and be so much easier to navigate that they’ll enjoy their experience and come again.
How Do You Make a WordPress Website Mobile Responsive?
Now that you understand why you should make your site mobile friendly; you might be wondering where to get started. If so, you’re in luck. By following these easy steps, you’ll be up to speed in no time:
• Take the Test: Google makes it easy to find out if your webpage is mobile friendly as it is, or if you need to do a bit of work to get it there. Just go to the mobile-friendly test page and enter your site’s URL.
• Adjust or Change Your Theme: While it’s true that almost all of the recent themes on WordPress are mobile-friendly, you still might need to spend some time tweaking things within that theme or considering other options to get the best results. If you’re using an older theme that hasn’t been updated to be mobile responsive, you should consider choosing another one or building your own.
• Take Advantage of Plugins: Plugins are extensions of the WordPress platform, written in the same language so that they integrate seamlessly with your site. WordPress is an open-source platform so developers have built thousands upon thousands of extensions to meet any need imaginable.
Here are 9 of the most popular Plugins for making your WordPress website mobile-friendly:
• WPTouch: Quickly and easily get a simple but elegant mobile-friendly theme for your WordPress website. This Plugin is, hands-down, the most popular and user-friendly option for getting more mobile-friendly.
• Touchy: Get control of how your mobile site looks—without having to change parts of your desktop site. It’s the best of both worlds. You get better on mobile devices while staying great on desktop.
• Superfly: The top choice for mobile responsive site navigation. This Plugin options a range of options to make menus mobile friendly and fit with the style of your site.
• AMP: Load faster—even if your site is content-heavy. This Plugin will improve the user experience for visitors who find your site through social media like Twitter or Pinterest.
• WP Super Cache: A free (and easy to use) way to make your site faster. This Plugin offers visitors static html files rather than PHP files to help speed things up.
• Jetpack: A range of tools and capabilities to help you grow traffic to your site. This Plugin protects your site from attack, backs everything up, and scans for Malware.
• Auto Optimize: Reduce your site’s load time by up to 30%. This Plugin partners with WP Super Cache to make caching work for your site instead of working against it.
• Hummingbird: Finds what is slowing your site down. Once you know where the problem is, it’s a lot easier to fix.
• Asset CleanUp: Break free of the unused code that is bogging your pages down. This Plugin allows you to “trim the fat” from the CSS code on each page to make sure that every element has what it needs to function without getting slowed down by things that aren’t needed.
What Are the Benefits of a Mobile-Friendly WordPress Page?
It’s hard to even think about all of the potential benefits that going mobile-friendly will have for your site, much less list them all.
Still, there are some major benefits that being mobile responsive will have for any site—whether it is built to market, sell, inform, or entertain.
• More people will find your site because it ranks higher in Google search results.
• When searchers find your site: it will load faster, be easier to navigate and be sharper and more professional looking.
• Those happy visitors will return to your site time after time to buy your products, use your services, search for information, or comment on your posts.
Conclusion
Why not get started today? You’ve got nothing to lose but the next person searching for what you do or the next visitor who can’t get your page to load on their phone. The benefits are real. There is an easy path to follow from where you are to where you want to be. The reasons why you should get started are numerous. There’s no good reason not to. Get that WordPress website whipped into shape for your mobile visitors, then sit back and enjoy the benefits.
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