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Make Your WordPress Blog Mobile Ready

Posted by on 24th Oct 2009 WordPress Plugins 5 comments

According to WordPress, based on visits to wordpress.com where they host blogs, there are more than 60 million page views that come from mobile phones per month. With mobile traffic growing, how your site renders on mobile devices is becoming more important.   Fortunately, some new WordPress plugins are making it possible to maintain your current custom theme while also serving up a mobile focused theme to your mobile visitors.

Before you add one more plugin to your WordPress blog, you should check out your analytics.  If you use Google Analytics than check out the reports under Visitors.   Then look under Browser Capabilities for reports on Browsers, Operating Systems, Browsers and OS and Screen Resolutions.  When you see lots of activity from mobile visitors than you will know it is time to explore mobile.

While the numbers are still small, I was surprised to see even this many visits for a site I manage, as shown in the Google Analytics report below:

mobile-analytics

While WordPress does not allow you to to have two themes at the same time, the following plugins read the information in a browser and when they detect a mobile browser they replace the current theme.   Your desktop users will not notice anything different.

Wptouch

WPtouch is an entire theme package for your WordPress website.  This theme is modeled after Apple’s app store design.  WPtouch makes your WordPress website load fast on mobile devices and shows your content clearly, without interfering with your regular theme.  Wptouch was reviewed on Blogging Tips awhile back in WPTouch: Make a mobile app from your blog – but there are even more features today.

Many WordPress sites are making use of more and more plugins which significantly increase the load time of pages and make your site very hard to use on mobile devices. WPtouch has focused on a  lightweight, fast-loading, theme.

WordPress Mobile Edition

WordPress Mobile Edition offers a mobile/phone/PDA friendly interface for your blog with some enhancements for advanced mobile browsers.  You can preview the advanced mobile theme here and see it from a desktop browser.

Both of these plugins have tens of thousands of downloads from wordpress.org with 4 star ratings and will make fine additions to your blog – when it’s time for you to go mobile!

David Silversmith is an Internet and Web analytics consultant with more than 20 years' experience managing both technology and customer service for information businesses. He is the former CTO at Carfax.com where he spent 12 years implementing and managing IT strategy. While there, he led the adoption of hosted Web analytics and implemented some of the earliest A/B testing applications to optimize visitor traffic. Silversmith also spent seven years at Nielson Claritas, a leading supplier of demographic information, establishing its technical support and training departments. He's also managed call centers supporting products such as Canon printers, and the Sony Magic Link - one of the first hand held PDAs.

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5 comments - Leave a reply
  • Posted by Patrick Oden on 25th Oct 2009

    I’m impressed that you have a couple of visits from people with Nintendo Wii! I didn’t realize the Wii had browsing capabilities.

    You make a great point about not wasting the time/effort/space to cater to mobile visitors until you start seeing them.

  • Posted by Senthil Ramesh on 25th Oct 2009

    Good to know about these. I am using mobifuse for making a mobile site for my blog.

  • Posted by Bimbytm31 on 27th Oct 2009

    Nice post.

    I was wandering around the web looking for a review on such plugins. Not exactly what I was looking for but still very good information. Many thanks.

  • Posted by BlogSmith on 28th Oct 2009

    Latest technology related posts are rare

  • Posted by Technology on 29th Oct 2009

    For people like me who were looking for new ideas regarding the wordpress blogs, this article seems to be very handy. I hope, I will be able to utilise this suggestion to the optimum. Thanks.