How To Take A Wordpress Website Mobile

A lot of WordPress blog owners think that by simply slapping in a plugin that mobilizes their website really does the trick when wanting to satisfy the mobile crowd, but they haven’t bothered to test that mobile site with any emulators so they can actually see or experience what their mobile visitors’ experience. If they did, they’d immediately remove the plugin after seeing that the conversion neither looks good, nor does it download well on a mobile device unless the user is 4G.

I’ve built a couple regular WordPress websites that I’ve later made mobile from using plugins, and both times I noticed the bounce rate (how long a visitor stays before leaving) was unusually high on both. I decided to test the sites using various phones around the office so I could gauge the experience on each, and when I did I realized I immediately needed to make those sites more mobile friendly.

A mobile website should have graphics that not only fit easily in the device window, but should weigh less than 7K each so they load quickly on phones with slower bandwidth. There’s also the consideration of whether you’ve laid out your site using tables or DIVs with columns that have defined widths, because those widths will automatically take the content right out of view for the mobile device. It may seem like a real pain in the rear, but the absolute best way to make sure your visitor is getting the best experience possible is to create a separate folder and website specifically for the mobile users, but to make life easier you can set that site up as a WordPress site that initially imports your current database from the main site, and then afterward updates dynamic content like your posts by using plugins like RSS Poster to pull in new content from your main site. Once you’ve gotten the mobile site set up with the new database from the main site, you can make adjustments that will resolve the graphics and other issues that degrade the mobile user experience. The graphics should NOT be used from a path back to the main site and then resized through CSS, because you’ll still have the issues of placing heavy graphics for extended download times that will cause your mobile users to leave immediately. Instead, just import them into the mobile websites uploads folder, and make them smaller using a program like Photoshop.

I highly recommend using the Carrington Mobile Theme which you can get free, and looks well on about every phone or tablet I’ve ever tested on. Even though the theme will carry headers to identify that its a mobile site (which should be called m.yourdomain.com) to Google, it’s a good idea to place a robots.txt file in your root directory of the main site that disallows the Google Mobile bot from spidering though that folder from the main site, but set up robots.txt file in the mobile WordPress root folder to allow all spiders full access to the mobile site. You can always create a mobile sitemap of the mobile site and submit it through Google Webmaster. This advice comes straight from Matt Cutts of Google, and after 4 months I’ve seen no duplicate content issues whatsoever.

By: Jenny Bacall

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Jenny Bacall is an avid WordPress blogger who is currently promoting the business below:
DISH Network