How to Make Your WordPress Site Mobile-Friendly? 5 Powerful Tips
Statista reports that more than half of the worldwide website traffic comes from mobile devices. So, if you have a website, making it friendly for mobile users is almost a necessity.
You don’t want to miss out on that huge chunk of prospects, right?
So, how easy it is to optimize your site for mobile?
Well, it can take a little work. But, if you are using WordPress, it does make things easier for you. In this article, we are going to tell you how to make your WordPress site mobile-friendly.
Let’s get into the details now.
Understanding the Importance of a Mobile-Friendly Site
Internet users aren’t only visiting sites from their desktops anymore. More people are now turning to their mobile phones to visit sites.
So, making your site friendly for every device is no longer a choice; it’s a necessity. Your website visitors should be able to find whatever they are looking for without any delay.
But, that’s not the only reason to keep your site mobile-friendly.
It’s important that your site ranks well in search engines like Google. And, Google loves sites that are responsive and perform well on mobile devices.
This means you could lose a lot of potential traffic if you neglect mobile optimization.
Let’s now talk about how to make a website mobile-friendly WordPress.
How to Make Your WordPress Site Mobile-Friendly?
1. Take Mobile-Friendly Test
Before you start making your site mobile-friendly, it’s important to know where it stands and what parts of it need improvement.
It’s virtually impossible to fix a problem when you don’t know the cause, right?
Fortunately, testing your site for mobile is not only easy but it’s free as well.
Google Mobile-Friendly Tester
One of the best tools is Google’s own Mobile-Friendly Tester.
Source: Google.com
Enter your domain and click on “Test URL”. The tool will tell you if your site is mobile-friendly or not.
Source: Google.com
The green text would mean that your site is already optimized for mobile devices. But, you need to do some work when you see the red text saying “Page is not mobile-friendly”.
Let’s explore another great tool.
MobileTest.me
This tool lets you pick a mobile device and see how your site would look on it. It provides an incredible way to have a sense of what your visitors would experience on your site.
Source: mobiletest.me
Here is how it looks after you enter your site and click on “Go”.
Source: mobiletest.me
But, that’s not it. You should dig a little deeper and check your site’s other important pages as well. All of your pages should look user-friendly on mobile.
2. Use a Responsive WordPress Theme
Developers recognize the importance of mobile, so you’ll seldom find a theme that’s not mobile-friendly.
Still, it’s important to make sure that you are using the best of the best.
So, before investing in any paid theme, you want to make sure it looks good on mobile by testing out the demo version.
Also, reading online reviews is a great way of finding out whether the users are happy with the product or not.
Moreover, if you can’t invest in a theme right now, you can find a free mobile-friendly theme from the WordPress repository.
Source: WordPress.org
3. Use SEO-Friendly WordPress Plugins
WordPress plugins help you add different functionalities to your site. However, as the number of installed plugins increase, the lines of code also increase.
This can increase the time your site takes to load after someone clicks on it, which you don’t want.
But, you can’t deny the importance of using WordPress plugins either. So, keep the number of plugins on your site to a minimum.
Some plugins can also help your site’s responsiveness on different devices including mobile.
Best Plugins to Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
There are a number of WordPress plugins that can improve your site’s mobile usability. Let’s talk about a few.
Jetpack
Source: WordPress.org
Jetpack is an all-in-one plugin developed by the folks behind the WordPress CMS. It helps your site’s SEO, analytics, marketing, security, and even more.
With Jetpack, you don’t have to use multiple plugins for different functionalities, which is good for mobile performance.
AMP for WP
Source: WordPress.org
Originally, this plugin was intended for the optimization of web pages for mobiles only. Now, the AMP for WP plugin optimizes your site’s pages for all types of devices.
Although it has a paid version that lets you get the most out of it, the free version should be good enough as well.
WP Fastest Cache
Source: WordPress.org
A caching plugin makes your site load faster for a user that has previously visited your site. It does that by saving the necessary information on a visitor’s first visit.
So, your site loads considerably faster on any subsequent visits.
WP Fastest Cache is a freemium plugin, meaning that some features come free and others don’t.
4. Avoid Using Pop-ups
One of the most effective ways to capture emails and build your subscribers’ list is through an opt-in form. You get your visitors to give their emails by offering something valuable in return.
However, pop-ups can interfere with the user experience. They are not very friendly to mobile visitors. So, you want to avoid them as much as possible.
You can capture your prospects’ emails by incorporating a sign-up form at the end of every blog post. Placing a sign-up form at the top right corner of every post is also an effective way to increase email subscribers.
Plus, Google has started penalizing the sites that use intrusive pop-ups that cover a site’s main content.
Source: Google.com
This is true whether your pop-up loads immediately after someone lands on your site or after they’ve spent some time.
So, you want to steer clear of anything that presents a hurdle for the visitors to access what they are looking for.
5. Minimize Your Site’s Loading Time
This one directly relates to human beings’ dwindling attention spans. People (and Google) generally prefer sites with faster speeds.
So, no matter what type of website you have, if it takes more than a couple of seconds to load, you risk losing a good chunk of your prospects.
Plus, page speed is an important ranking factor now, and you don’t want to lose your search engine rankings.
Fortunately, you can make your site load faster by implementing a few strategies.
Minimize HTTP Requests
The more the number of elements on your web page, the higher HTTP requests it has to send to download those elements.
This can make your web page take more time to load. So, you want to minimize the HTTPS requests it has to send.
To find out the number of HTTP requests a web page makes, go to Chrome’s Developer Tools.
Source: Google.com
Go to “Network” and you’ll see the total number of requests your web page makes at the bottom left corner.
Source: Google.com
An easy way to reduce HTTP requests is by removing unnecessary images and reducing the size of the important ones.
In addition, Synchronously loading your page’s JavaScript files and combine CSS files also help reduce HTTP requests.
Choose the Right Hosting Company
Where you host your site’s files can affect your site’s performance significantly. You want to choose a hosting provider that is fast and has great reviews.
Plus, your requirements will also determine which type of hosting you need.
Generally, there are three main hosting types:
Shared hosting: Where the resources are shared with multiple other sites. It’s the cheapest and can handle only a small amount of website traffic.
VPS hosting: A Virtual Private Server is similar to shared hosting, but you get dedicated resources on the server. A VPS hosting is faster than shared hosting and generally more expensive.
Dedicated Hosting: A dedicated hosting is where your site gets dedicated resources. It’s the fastest of the three, which also makes it the most expensive.
Before choosing a hosting service, you need to be mindful of how much traffic you are going to get and how much you can invest in hosting.
Additional Tips
- If a pop-up is necessary to use, your visitor should be able to close it easily. You don’t want a prospect to hit the back button because they couldn’t close your pop-up form
- If you have an e-commerce store, make it easy for the visitors to make purchases from their mobile devices
- Make your sharing buttons easy to click on a mobile device so that your visitors can share your site with their network
Final Thoughts
This was all about how to make your WordPress site mobile-friendly. Mobile usage is increasing at an unprecedented rate.
More than half of the world’s website traffic comes from mobile users. And, this trend only seems to rise in the future.
As a webmaster, it’s almost imperative to keep your site mobile-friendly. Otherwise, get ready to lose a good chunk of prospects, and in turn, conversions.
Here is a quick recap of how to make your WordPress site mobile-friendly:
- Test your site’s speed
- Use mobile-friendly WordPress themes
- Use SEO-friendly plugins
- Increase your site’s loading speed
- Avoid using pop-ups, at least, on the mobile version of your site
- Choose a fast hosting service
Mobile-friendliness is a part of SEO, and SEO is an ever-evolving field. So, you need to be in touch with the latest trends.
Don’t want to handle all that? Let the pros do it for you! Get in touch with us here!
Want to learn how to get your website SEO-friendly? Click here.
