How to Make Your Website Mobile Friendly in WordPress

As of 2021, there were over 4.6 billions Internet users and over 1.5 billion websites exist. And with over 6.648 billions smartphone users, that means if your website isn’t mobile friendly, you’re probably missing out on sales. In this article, you’ll learn about what is mobile-friendly versus responsive design, and how to make your website mobile friendly using WordPress plugins.

What's the difference?

Mobile-friendly website design is solely focusing on creating a site that suits smartphones and other small mobile devices. Responsive design focuses on all device and browser widths. For example, on the desktop, you use a cursor to navigate your site, and in mobile-friendly sites, you use your thumb or fingers to scroll. Mobile-friendly websites usually are streamlined for a faster and easier user experience.

To check if your site is at least responsive, you can reduce the size of your browser, in your regular desktop computer or laptop, and see if images become smaller, or some of the format of the site changes. In most cases, if you reduce the browser enough, your site will show up with the content lined up as one column.

If you’re not sure that your site is mobile-friendly, you can check on Google’s Mobile-Friendly test site. Just insert your website link in the form.

In some cases, like running a simple blog, you may not need a mobile plugin. However, here are some of the benefits that a mobile-friendly version of your site can provide:

Better user experience

The benefit is that you can simplify what you want people to see, instead of relying on responsive design to scroll a page for all of the content. Kind of tedious scrolling through 10 blog articles on a page, in such a small device, right?

You can focus on making specific content appear first in mobile

The benefit is that you can simplify what you want people to see, instead of relying on responsive design to scroll a page for all of the content. Kind of tedious scrolling through 10 blog articles on a page, in such a small device, right?

Because of a smaller device-width, you have no choice but to put together a design that fits the screen. You can also eliminate the extra filler content, or customize how your users will access that information. You’ll find that traffic stats like bounce rate, time on site, and even page views will improve. Additionally, there’s a higher chance that your website visitors will click on your call to actions.

Faster site speed

Do you like slow loading websites? Probably not, correct? Mobile-friendly designed sites are super quick on load time. This is due to the fact that your site isn’t loading everything that your desktop version displays. Each image, video, your site’s styling and code, as well as the textual content, all play a factor into how fast or slow your website loads. Even if you use caching, a mobile-friendly page will show up much faster.

While all of these are fantastic benefits, you might not want to work on a mobile-friendly site design, and that’s where WordPress mobile plugins come in handy. They are designed to deliver a mobile-ready theme that you can do some customizations, like choosing what content to display, refining your navigation menu, or uploading a smaller website logo.

Below are some WordPress mobile-friendly plugins. Please note that most of these are free, but may offer a premium paid version, so that you can customize your mobile theme even further.

• Jetpack

• WPTouch

• WordPress Mobile pack

• AMP for WP

Jetpack

Jetpack is well known in the WordPress community to be a plugin that contains a lot of features. For example, the Jetpack plugin includes features for comments, CDN, speed optimization, security, tracking traffic, social sharing, and even mobile-friendly themes. If you’re already using this plugin, then you just need to navigate in your WordPress admin area to the Jetpack plugin settings and “Enable the Jetpack Mobile theme”. This plugin is completely free to use.

WPTouch

WPTouch is a plugin that offers a simple mobile-first WordPress theme. You can choose what devices and browsers to deliver your mobile theme to, choose theme colors, choose a specific font to display on the frontend, and more. If the simple free theme isn’t your cup of tea, then you can buy one of their mobile themes from their website. You can also buy extensions that include better mobile caching, more font control, ad placement, and more.

WordPress Mobile pack

WordPress Mobile pack says it transforms your site into more like a mobile app, but it provides a mobile theme with some limited customization options. The only issue with this particular plugin is that it has issues with caching at times. The upside is the themes provided by the plugin. Once you select a theme, you can customize its colors, fonts, and add a log. Additionally, you can choose what content to display on your pages.

AMP for WP

AMP for WP is designed around Accelerated Mobile Pages, launched a few years back by the Google AMP Project. AMP was created to help website owners deliver a faster mobile experience. This plugin provides some custom mobile layouts, as well as a lot of different features like:

• Widget support

• WooCommerce support

• Compatible with popular SEO plugins like Yoast

• Infinite scrolling support

• Social sharing support

• Google Analytics support

• Overlay navigation menu bar

• Ability to upload logo

• Google Adsense support

• Custom post type and taxonomies support

• Ability to create your own custom mobile theme

And this is just a short list of the many more features listed on the plugin download page. AMP for WP does offer some premium extensions that add AMP support to different plugins, and they even have premium mobile-friendly themes.

Your goal with your website is to get a return on investment. If quite a few of your website visitors are visiting while using a mobile device, you’re going to want to seriously consider making your site mobile-friendly. Responsive design is only halfway there, as you need to customize the user’s experience per device width to maximize the chance of them subscribing to your newsletter, buying your services, or even reading your articles.