How To Make Your WordPress Blog Mobile Friendly – Best Solutions

Are you looking to make your WordPress blog mobile friendly? If you have not yet thought about it, you should as Google have made mobile site an official search engine ranking factor.

In this exclusive  guide, I will share various options ( WordPress mobile Plugins + Themes) that you can use to make sure your WordPress blog is mobile readable and passes the Google mobile friendliness test.

WordPress Mobile Friendly Blog
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Before I start sharing all the solutions, I recommend you to go to this link, add your blog URL and it will show if your website is mobile friendly or not according to Google.

mobile friendly test
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If it is, you don’t have to do anything, but if the result is negative, you should work right away to make your blog mobile friendly.

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In this tutorial, I will explain all the solutions which you can use to make your WordPress blog mobile ready. So, lets look at the possible solutions and pick the one which you find best for your blog.

Making WordPress Blog Mobile ready:

1. Use a responsive theme:

Responsive WordPress design
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If your WordPress theme is not mobile friendly, it’s not a perfect theme for your blog. Reason being is, you should not just think about mobile screen but also consider that we are living in multi-screen world. A responsive theme will ensure that your site would load perfectly on all screen size ( Smartphone, Tablets, SmartTV and any other screen type).

All the modern WordPress themes are now responsive and if your WordPress theme is not responsive,that means you are using an outdated theme. You can use any of these sites to check the responsiveness of your theme and if your result is not responsive, you should change your theme and get a responsive theme. For free themes, you can browse WordPress theme directory with responsive tag or check popular free WordPress themes and pick the one which is responsive.

If you are running a professional blog (Blog which is making money or business blog), I would recommend you to invest a bit and purchase Genesis Theme, which is the most popular premium theme and it is responsive too.  What ever WordPress theme you pick, ensure that your theme is responsive.

Here are list of WordPress themes which I recommend (All are responsive)

2. Customize responsive design for mobile:

If you are a theme developer or hiring a developer to design/develop your WordPress theme, I would suggest you to take advantage of CSS media queries for responsiveness. This is a better solution to make your responsive design more mobile friendly and this is the solution I use for ShoutMeLoud.

Custom WordPress mobile theme
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To give you an example, in a responsive design usually your sidebar and footer will show after the blog content. The fact is, many of your sidebar or footer widgets are not at all required on mobile device. Using CSS media queries, you can configure what should load on the screen based on screen-width. This way you will give a better user-experience to your mobile or tablet users. I have seen very few WordPress blogs taking advantage of this, but this gives the best user-experience to your mobile readers. You would require to spend a little extra for this solution, but it’s totally worth it. If you want to understand what I’m talking about, I would recommend you to browse www.shoutmeloud.com on your mobile phone browser.

3. Jetpack Plugin mobile theme:

Jetpack Mobile theme
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Jetpack WordPress plugin is a great free solution to offer WordPress mobile site. You need to activate this module after activating Jetpack WordPress plugin. This plugin comes with many useful configuration option such as you can configure custom menu for your mobile site, you can decide which sidebar to load. (It can load only one sidebar, which is good for smaller screen size on mobile phones).

I have written a detailed guide on Jetpack mobile theme over here. You should also look at this official help guide to know various configuration options.

Conclusion: What option is best to make WordPress mobile friendly?

There are many other WordPress mobile plugins and solutions out there, but you can pick any of the above solutions for your site. My suggestion is to definitely have a responsive design and if possible use CSS media queries.

If your site doesn’t look mobile friendly (Optimum user-experience) on small-screen even after using a responsive design, you should consider using WPTouch paid plugin over Jetpack plugin. If you don’t have any single penny to invest, Free WPTouch plugin or JetPack plugin is the best free solution for you.

Do remember that your role here is not just to offer mobile site, but to ensure that it increases your conversions and you should be able to monetize your mobile site with proper ad placement.

Do let me know which WordPress mobile plugin or solution you are using to make your WordPress site mobile friendly? Do share this article with other bloggers, as it will help them to make their WordPress blog mobile ready. You can share this guide on your Twitter, Facebook or Google plus.

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

13 thoughts on “How To Make Your WordPress Blog Mobile Friendly – Best Solutions”

  1. Vinay

    Nice article! If the old site is not mobile friendly and you are not willing to change it look, i think media query will be good option to make it mobile friendly. It costs little more as we have to hire front-end code to execute this task.

    On the other hand, if we change theme to a responsive theme, we may have to modify our posts and pages according to new theme.

  2. Sreehari Anilkumar

    Thanks, This was really helpful. Your blog is the best for beginners and well as experts.

  3. Mridusmita Choudhury

    I wanted to hire a web-designer but your site helped me build a website on wordpress from scratch. Thank you so much. I have a question though: I have used a responsive theme (wilson) for my website and installed plugins with the help of tutorials from your site. But, the sidebar on the website is not visible on the mobile website. Not even after the post. How do I rectify it?
    Also, I want only excerpts from my article both on web and mobile site. How do I do it? Hope you reply

  4. vishal verma

    Hi
    Thanks for this great post!
    I’M checking my blog Dignol.org with google mobile friendly test nd I am very happy because it is mobile friendly.
    But there is a problem all the sidebar shows in Mobile.
    Please give solution for this.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Vishal
      That’s ok because you are using a responsive theme. You can hire a coder to hide sidebar on particular screen size. Or you can ignore this, if it’s not much of an issue.

  5. mahesh

    Its a good info harsh. Can you please also post more information about handling 404 errors and how to reset WordPress settings. If someone mistakenly changed php code in editor and dont know how to revert back then what is the solution to reset back without loss of data. Please help on this or post an article on this.

  6. vicky

    yup, am happy my website is mobile friendly one. Thanks a lot for your post man

  7. John

    Hello your Blog is really very nice and very useful for Me. Thank you for your Sharing.

  8. Moptoolz

    Nice article and timely.

    As I have been in the business of theme configuration for quite sometime now, I would suggest using a responsive theme is the best for two reasons.

    1. You reduce the headache of multiple plugins on your sites which tend to get your website heavy and most times witness fatal error. Because most mobile plugins don’t seem to go well with your choice of the mother theme.

    2. For the purpose of customization. With a responsive theme, you can virtually add and get on a mobile view those appearance which you wished for. With the use of the right minify codings, is loads faster and your website have a homogeneity across all platform, thus selling and maintaining your brand on all platforms.

    However ain’t against mobile theme plugins (WP-Touch, Rocket Plugin and the likes)but to minimize expenses and get full control of your webpage appearance, a responsive theme solves it all.

    In addition, if your main theme isn’t responsive and you wish to keep it cos of the customization, you can download mobile theme selector and get a cool free responsive theme and harness it and boom you will get a responsive view for all mobile platforms.

  9. Pravesh Singhal

    awsm post, i check my website and it show that your site is mobile friendly thnx for sharing this meaningfull post.

  10. DeveloperX

    Hello Harsh,

    Nice options you listed here, However I will recommend “Responsive Theme” because of many reasons, one of which is “Ad arrangement”.

    It automatically adjusts your ads and you do not need to do extra coding and stuff. It removes a lot of your Headache, saves time and Money as well (WP-Touch).

    Regards!

  11. Abhishek

    Thanx for this amazing post checked my site its no ile friendly

  12. Tanmay

    I would recommend responsive themes like Genesis. The other plugins which use different URL for the mobile version is not good for SEO.

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