If there is anything well-established over the past few years, it must be the trend of people’s preference to quickly looking something up and checking emails or Facebook on the web. It is worthy of discussion when it refers to the assessment of whether or not the development is good for social interaction, but not what we are going to talk about in the article. Something that is for sure is the importance of catering to mobile users along with the mobile generation.
Creating a website that looks well on both desktop and mobile screens is possible for people with the know-how. Nevertheless, no all WordPress users are front-end developers. Many are just regular bloggers, business owners, or hobbyists. For these people, making a mobile-friendly website is not within the realm of possibility any more. Fortunately, there are plenty of WordPress plugins, which can be great helpful in making a good-looking WordPress website on various screens.
The article is going to introduce some widely used and that have proved to be the best WordPress plugins for making a WordPress website mobile responsive.
If You Need Mobile Theme Plugins
Ideally, you can choose a WordPress theme that is suited to all screens. The reality is that not all WordPress themes are mobile responsive as expected. In this situation, you may want to find another theme to give what the first one is missing, which will take up more website space at the same time. Here’s where we come to theme switchers that are developed with mobile use in mind.
WPtouch
WPtouch WordPress plugin is designed for automatically adding a simple yet elegant mobile theme for mobile visitors to a WordPress website. Highlight of the plugin is the plugin’s SEO friendliness. Recommended by Google, WPtouch makes it possible for your mobile website to pass the Google Mobile test, thus ensuring no drop of your SEO rankings caused by a non-module friendly website.
WPtouch features with an administrative panel, with which you can customize your WordPress website’s appearance. The plugin is also able to deliver a user-friendly as well as stylish version of the site to your mobile visitors in a fast speed, with no needing to modify a single bit of code.
Jetpack
Along with the Mobile Theme module, Jetpack allows you to optimize your WordPress website for mobile devices by benefiting from easy CSS editing, contact forms, custom image galleries, and high-speed content network images.
Rest assured, Jetpack includes many powerful tools like site stats & analytics, automatic social network sharing, and security tools as protection from brute force attacks, 24/7 uptime monitoring, and etc. to help build, grow, and secure your WordPress website.
Make a Mobile App
Are you expecting to take user experience up a notch and make your WordPress website look and feel more like an app? The following WordPress plugin can help do so on demand with ease.
WordPress Mobile Pack
The WordPress Mobile Pack 2.0+ aims to empower bloggers, publishers, and other content creators to go beyond responsiveness and allows you to package your existing content into a cross-platform mobile web app.
WordPress Mobile Pack is supported by most popular devices including iPhone, Android smartphone, Windows Phone 8, Firefox OS, and is compatible with browsers like Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 10, Safari, Firefox, and Android-Native Browser. Due to that, you can instantly have access to your content, without having to download and install an app.
When You Are Looking for a Theme Switcher
Instead of offering you plug-and-play services, this type of WordPress plugins give you custom themes for better serving your visitors. It is especially useful when you don’t plan to make specific changes to the WordPress website, nor have a responsive theme so as to have a mobile-friendly online presence.
Any Mobile Theme Switcher
Any Mobile Theme Switcher detects mobile browser and displays the theme as per your settings done in admin. It recognizes iPhone/iPad, Android, Android Tab, Windows Mobile, Opera Mini, Blackberry and more. The plugin enables you to a different mobile theme in accordance with different appearance of each mobile browser.
To Optimize Content
Undoubtedly as a WordPress website owner, you have to make sure your content adapt to the platform it’s on. Your theme can handle itself fine if you’re using text and images. However, when it comes to complex interface elements, or cross-platform content, you need the help of content optimizers.
WP Mobile Detect
Written by Jesse Friedman, WP Mobile Detect offers a possibility for the User Admin to easily control over the WordPress website on when to show or hid the content based on visitor’s OS or devices.
On the one hand, the plugin replaces content with alternatives instead of relying on display or techniques. For example, when a infographic of full-size in your post is displayed on a visitor’s mobile device, WP Mobile Detect will take it as a non-user initiated download.
On the other hand, it offers an easy way for the server level WordPress to make the decision of showing the content only when the user is not on a tablet or phone. All you need is wraping the inforgraphic in a shortcode of [notdevice] [/notdevice] in advance. Aside from that, you can let your visitors consume the content as they choose by wrapping a link and corresponding text to the infographic in a shortcode of [device] [/device].
To Optimize Images and Media
It is a common sense that redundant images and media can lead to a slow WordPress website. To avoid that, many people may choose to reduce or uninstall plugins, including what we’ve mentioned above. Another way is to optimize your images and media then reduce your mobile visitors’ needs of bandwidth.
WP Smush
WP Smush uses the free WPMU DEV WordPress Smush API to reduce image file sizes, improve your WordPress website performance, and boost your SEO.
Features available in WP Smush include optimizing images using advanced lossless compression techniques, setting maximum width and height and large images will automatically scale down before being added to your media library, processing JPEG, GIF, and PNG image files, and so on so forth.
BJ Lazy Load
BJ Lazy Load comes in a function of replacing all the images, thumbnails and content inframes of your post with placeholders, and not loading the content until visitors scroll your page. And it makes the hidden content be loaded at the time it draws near to the browser window. The result is, lazy loading saves bandwidth and makes your WordPress website load faster.
Such a good recommendation list of mobile WordPress themes or plugins. Being a personal blogger, I really feel the change of user behavior. With the popularity of mobile devices, people are more likely to use laptop and smartphones to browse online pages and search for something. It is an inexorable trend, so webmaster and bloggers have to try other ways to make their website content better fit mobile devices. These mobile friendly WordPress themes and plugins are good helpers. I like this post and I am willing to come back for other list of recommendations.