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How to Make Your WordPress Site Mobile-Friendly

Did you know that last year, for the first time in history, online users accessed the Internet more frequently on their mobile devices than they did their computers or laptops. The shift from browsing the Internet at home to while on the go meant a lot of different changes needed to be made in the ways companies were portraying themselves online. This year, Google announced that it would be taking mobile-friendliness into account when assigning page rankings, making it even more important that websites be clearly visible and easily navigated when being viewed on a mobile device.

If you run a website or blog from WordPress, there are many things you can do to improve the mobile-friendliness of your site and they don’t take much time at all.

Choosing your web hosting provider carefully
Of course if you choose a bad web host, you’ll naturally be dealing with slowness and unreliability along with a lack of knowledge about how to make your WordPress site mobile-friendly. But if you’re going to have a WordPress site, you need to make sure your web host is well-versed in this platform. Only then can they make recommendations about how to best make it mobile-friendly.

Choose your theme carefully
In WordPress there are themes that load quickly and others that aren’t, leaving the user staring at a blank page waiting for it to load. When choosing your theme select one that is tagged as having a “responsive layout” to ensure that it’s responsive and that it will load quickly.

Make content mobile-friendly
Remember that if people are viewing your website on a mobile device, the chances are good that are on-the-go and don’t have a lot of time to scroll through pages and pages. Use short paragraphs, subtitles, and bulleted lists to make text readable and easy to scan. Also include lots of whitespace on each page to avoid making it look cluttered.

Use plugins wisely
WordPress has a host of plugins and website owners can become so enamored with them that they end up collecting a lot of them over time. While they may be useful to the PC user, all of those plugins will only slow down the load time of your site and frustrate the mobile user.

Don’t forget about your images
If you simply upload an image to your site and don’t optimize it in any way, it’s going to be very large and again, slow down the load time and mobile-friendliness of your site. There are a variety of plugins that will help customize your images. They are: Image Pro, CW Image Optimizer, Imsanity, Hammy, EWWW Image Optimizer, and PB Responsive Images.

While you manage and edit your site from your PC or laptop, you might not be giving a second thought to the mobile-friendliness of it, but ignoring it is a big mistake. You’ve taken so much time making sure your website is already perfect, for the intent of making it easy for users to visit and navigate. Not making the extra effort to make sure your site is mobile-friendly will make all of that work for naught and worse, will have visitors leaving your page to find something else.