More and more people
are employing tablets and smartphones each day across the world.
Actually, it’s predicted that by the finish of 2014, more people
will be making use of their mobile devices to explore the web as
opposed to desktop Internet. Fail to know the power of the mobile
market, and you surely will miss a chance on opportunities big and
small to arrive at a bigger market of patrons.
Fortunately for you,
it’s not as technically demanding as you might initially think to
optimize your website for mobile use. Consider the following top
plugins to get your WordPress website up to par with the rest of the
mobile-ready web.
To make website
handier for mobile uses, the spotlight is in the following areas:
Offering
mobile-optimized design and content:
This means ensuring the website fits smaller screens suitably,
serves up content to mobile users in a clear way, and offers
usability for touch-controlled browsers.
Quick loading
time:
Mobile Internet is not as quick as wifi or broadband, thus anything
that slows down your website’s loading time can cause untimely
abandonment and must be avoided.
As a result the
plugins on the list focus on these areas.
Theme
Switchers
While the plugins in
this class do not offer plug-and-play solutions, they let you to
server your mobile visitors with custom themes. This is helpful if
you either do not have a responsive theme, do not like the responsive
edition of your theme or want to make additional mobile-precise
changes to your website.
1. Any Mobile
Theme Switcher
The plugin Any
Mobile Theme Switcher will sense mobile browsers and server a
pre-defined theme to users accessing your website by means of their
tablet. It supports an extensive range of devices from iOS and
Android over Blackberry and Windows phones to less frequent devices.
A different theme can be chosen for each browser to tailor the user
experience further.
A pro edition is
obtainable which offers different home pages for different devices,
QR-code bookmarking, adding ‘click-to-call’ phone numbers and
maintaining the W3 total cache plugin.
2. Mobile Smart
Mobile Smart senses
whether a mobile user is accessing your site and will exhibit a
preferred design from your current themes. Supported devices take in
iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows Phone and over.
Users can also be
given the choice to switch between the standard and mobile theme
manually. Since Mobile Smart is a theme switcher and not a plugin
that complements mobile capabilities or any sort of customization,
you will have to build your own mobile website edition.
Mobile Theme
Plugins
These plugins give
unusually good mobile themes. The themes have been built keeping in
mind mobile use and hence are lightweight and quick. Content is
frequently reduced to bare minimums and do not share the appearance
of the original theme from the get go.
1. WP Touch
When it comes to
mobile solutions for WordPress, WP Touch evidently leads the list
with more than 6 million downloads. The plugin restores your site
with an attractive, content-centric mobile theme. The outcome is easy
to use, loads quick, and is simple to read.
WP Touch arrives in
a free and paid version. With “Bauhaus,” the free edition of the
plugin gives only one mobile theme. It enables basic customization –
like changing colors, language detection, and typography – to suit
your custom code, brand, and additional styling choices.
In the paid version,
you have an option between 7 themes intended for different
requirements and websites. It also gives a mobile caching option,
support for responsive images in addition to the opportunity to post
ads and A/B split test them.
What’s special
about this plugin is how simple it is to install. Once turned on,
your site will be routinely optimized for mobile users, without
altering any settings. Visitors are also offered the option to switch
between the mobile-only website and your usual theme.
Paid accounts begin
at $49 each year for single-site users. A solution for minimum 5
websites in addition to agency and enterprise versions are obtainable
and charge $99, $199 and $349 correspondingly.
2. iThemes Mobile
The iThemes mobile
plugin is a best-only choice without a free edition, It gives four
customizable themes to show your posts and pages and also gives the
opportunity to build your own. You can alter the styling of
headlines, fonts, navigation menus and pick a custom, mobile-only
header image.
What’s very
appealing is that iThemes mobile lets you to allot different themes
to different podiums. That means you can tailor your site for iOS and
Android users and alter its appearance across a variety of devices.
The functionality of
iThemes mobile is stripped down to bare fundamentals. Show of
sidebars and widget areas is unluckily not supported natively. More
superior users can put in those by customizing obtainable theme
files. However, if you are competent enough, then you might decide on
coding your own responsive theme instead.
Pricing begins at
$45 for personal bloggers, or single-site owners with business and
developer licenses wearing price tags of $75 and $150.
3. Jetpack Mobile
Theme
The best feature in
Jetpack is the analytics. It is chocked full of other handy plugins,
together with a mobile theme.
One turned on the
dashboard, the theme gives a clean, organized interface, which makes
it simple for mobile visitors to examine your website. The makers
also took good care to make it lightweight in order to ensure
prompt-loading times.
Customization
features of the Jetpack mobile theme take in exhibiting quotes or
full version of posts, custom header images, and custom menus in
addition to backgrounds. You can even put in your own css to regulate
the appearance of the theme entirely. Jetpack will exhibit a sidebar
for mobile users, unlike other solutions.
As part of the
Jetpack plugin collection, this solution is at no cost and obtainable
in the WordPress plugin directory.
4. WP Mobile
Detector Mobile Plugin
While it is an
excellent question why its name consists of the word ‘mobile’ two
times, the WP Detector Mobile Plugin is the sole option on this list
that will differentiate between regular smartphones and cellphones,
and offer a different website version for all. It also tracks access
to your site from both types of mobile devices.
The plugin takes in
7 mobile themes, which feature touch-optimized layouts, widgets,
collapsible menus and over, but are quite basic in general. Picking
one of your offered themes for mobile users is also feasible. The
plugin’s UX can be little confusing and it consists of ads for the
pro version.
The free edition of
this plugin is accepted among users and has been downloaded nearly
260,000 times. A pro edition is obtainable starting at $50.
Content
Optimizers
1. WP Mobile
Detect
This plugin is
pretty different from the rest on the list. While WP Mobile Detect
also senses mobile devices to serve up different content for them,
its approach is different than employing a mobile-specific theme.
Instead, the plugin offers a wide range of shortcode, which can be
employed to decide which part of content is showed for what kind of
device.
This way you can
take in or rule out parts of the content for phones, desktops or
tablets. The plugin even goes so far as to let model-specific rules
so that parts of your website will, for instance, only be evident in
iPads.
If employed together
with a responsive theme, this can be relatively useful. One of the
major points of criticism of these themes in contrast to
mobile-specific solutions is their size. Even though a
responsively-designed theme will follow the smaller screen size, it
can still be significantly bigger than a theme aimed directly at
mobile devices.
WP mobile detect
allows you keep out those parts of your content that may otherwise
block up your mobile user’s bandwidth and lead them to abandon your
website before time. The plugin’s shortcodes offer substantial
flexibility to customizing your website to a device or podium.
Media
Optimizers
Images and media
generally frame the bulk of a site’s load. If you choose against
using any of the above mentioned solutions, it is a good thought to
at least optimize this sort of content thus reducing your mobile
visitor’s bandwidth requirements.
1. WP Smush.it
This plugin WP
Smush.it, which is managed by WPMU DEV, links your website to Yahoo’s
Smush.it image reduction service. The service minimizes the size of
your images by shredding away needless information.
Images frequently
contain countless extra data – like gps coordinates, kind of camera
used, and creation date – which divide up their size and are of no
significance to your site’s users.
The plugin will run
involuntarily in the background and optimize images as they are
uploaded. Current media files can be optimized in batch. It is a
“lossless” tool, which implies the images will not alter their
appearance or visual quality.
2. EWWW Image
Optimizer
In addition to
having one of the top plugin names ever, EWWW image optimizer will
routinely optimize images uploaded to your site by changing them to
the file format that will generate the smallest size. Consequently,
pages will load quicker and employ less bandwidth.
Optimization in
volume for accessible media is feasible and the plugin keeps in mind
which images have been processed earlier so they won’t be optimized
again. By default, the service employs lossless procedures but lossy
optimization is also obtainable. It also works with most general
image gallery plugins.
3. BJ Lazy Load
For those who do not
know, sluggish loading means that rather than downloading all media
on a page from the start, media files and images will only be loaded
on demand when they become noticeable on screen. That way the early
loading size (and time) of a given page or post can be considerably
minimized without any damage for the viewer.
BJ Lazy Load is a
plugin, which offers this trait. It substitutes all your post
thumbnails, post images, gravatar images, and content iframes along
with placeholders and loads the content simply when visitors scroll
the page. The secreted content will be loaded when it gets near to
the browser window. The plugin also routinely serves scaled down
images for responsive deign.
PS
To get back to the
start: If you frequently find yourself in conversations that are
blocked by mobile phone use, a cool way to make your social
assemblies less mobile-centric is to have each one put their devices
in a heap of the tablet at the beginning.
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