The number of mobile users is booming and there are no signs of a drop in this ratio in the near future. Mobile has become an essential platform for a number of business owners to showcase their product and services through a business application. These app-based services reach an extended audience and therefore it is more important than ever to let your website go mobile-friendly.
There are a majority of customers who pass their time merely on their smartphones. Having a mobile-responsive WordPress website can grab the attention of these customers towards your company’s app, which is ultimately a profit for the business. A website that takes much time to load over mobile devices gets impacted with a poor search rank; that’s because the latest mobile-friendly search update from Google prefers the websites that are responsive in nature and offers them better ranking than those that are not.
Developing a mobile-friendly website is profitable in a number of ways. Here is a detailed guide on how to optimize your WordPress website for mobile visitors.
1. Find the right hosting plan.
Picking the right hosting plan is the foremost requirement that should be addressed when trying to optimize your WordPress website. For this purpose, choose a reliable hosting company. Make sure your website is not shared over a common server as it can slow down the loading speed. Thus, beware of cheap hosting plans and choose the services of a company that offers economical and quality hosting services. Ensure that the hired company is efficiently handling web traffic towards your site.
2. Choose a fast WordPress theme.
Choosing a perfect WordPress theme for your responsive website should be a top priority. You need to look for themes that are lightweight and can upload easily over major browsers. Moreover, using a design that is not coded well and has excess images throughout the design can add weight to the web page that increases the load time. Therefore, it is recommended you choose a responsive design that could load equally over phones, laptops, and tablets.
3. Make the content adaptive.
A responsive website requires adaptive content so that they can scale down perfectly to mobile devices. The content can be made adaptive by creating alternatives such as short titles. Moreover, content type such as infographics may prove to be meaningless content for mobile simply because of the size of the screen. In such cases, it is advised not to deliver the content at all. If you wish to add any content display, add the content carefully by making it short and catchy.
4. Monitor your plugins.
The more plugins on your WordPress website, the more performance issues may occur. Thus, it is important to install the plugins after performing thorough research. A number of plugins can slow down the speed of a WordPress website, which is always a loss for the website owner. Plugins slow down the speed of the website because of the bad coding and installation of outdated versions.
5. Optimize images for the website.
Having images throughout your website enable users to remain interested in the content. It keeps the content from looking dull and boring and helps to share the article more frequently. Make use of plugins to optimize images over the websites. It won’t hurt the speed of the website. Uploading the right plugin for image optimization purposes ensures that images will only be uploaded when the required area over the phone becomes visible to the users. It helps to reduce the page load time offering satisfied user experience.
6. Install a theme-switcher.
A theme-switcher is important to install if you are not using a plugin to provide a theme. The level of control differs from plugin to plugin and therefore you need to pick something that suits well to all the platforms that are being targeted. It is recommended to choose “any mobile theme plugin” as it allows individual assignment to browse through a wide range of mobile devices and some tablets.
7. Go through the testing phase.
After performing all the above-mentioned tasks, you then have to test the website for its performance. It is not wise to trust your code and responsive design without first testing everything; undergoing testing will help to ensure flawless performance. You can test the performance of your website by running it on several mobile devices. This will help you to notice the performance of the website and its appearance on different devices.
