Sunday 12 October 2014

TOP WordPress Plugins for Mobile Optimization


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.
Do you require adding some precise WP plugin to you website? You don’t have to be anxious. Fortune Softtech New York’s professionals will build the right applications and WordPress plugins for your website, allowing you to tailor the features that are inbuilt in WordPress.

Wednesday 3 September 2014

Social Media & SEO: How Your Pages Can Get You to the Top of Search Results


SEO/SEM (search engine optimization/search engine marketing) is a complete industry of its own, and by having social media pages, you will position higher in searches. SEO is complex, and it takes in a lot of algorithms, other variables and keywords – and the majority of them will be applied to your website – not to your social networks. However, there are things you can do with your social media pages that will aid you in search positioning. Here is what you should know:
Facebook: Google (and all other search engines) has indexed Facebook pages in its searches for a while now. It’s simple to spot a Facebook page turn up in the top results if a company does not have a website or if its Facebook page is extremely popular. When someone is doing a search, Google’s algorithms will choose a Facebook page’s category, name, vanity URL and keywords in your About Section. So if you need your Facebook page to show up in organic searches, ensure all the fields mentioned are filled out properly. Also guarantee your page is very active. Comments, likes and shares will absolutely impact the search results, although the posts themselves don’t add up. (posts don’t show up in searches).
Google+: Having an active Google + page will aid your business turn up in searches (especially local searches and if the person searching is signed in on Google). The sum of reviews and +1s your page has will also influence the results. If you are not familiar with the platform or don’t know how to use it, at least make sure your Google+ Local (old Google Places) page is claimed - that will put your business on the map and also help people find you.
Check-ins: When someone checks-in at your place using Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp or another app, they are not only notifying their friends where they are, they are also sending a signal to Google's algorithms verifying your physical location. That is an imperative sign for search engines, and it aids you come up in local organic searches. So ensure all your pages are claimed and inspire your customers to check-in. A good way to do that is by putting up a poster and developing check-in offers to reward your customers - that won't only rouse check-ins, but also improve loyalty.
Geotagged media: Most smart phones and tablets have a geotag attribute that automatically marks photos and videos with the place they are taken at. If those photos and videos are uploaded into Instagram, Flickr or YouTube, they will send search engines another indicator of your physical position and help with search outcome.
Reviews: They are not only assisting clients fix on where/what to buy, but they also control search results. The amount of reviews and their rankings (the number of stars) will impact which business turn ups first. Search engines like assisting users find good businesses, so they won't list organizations with lots of bad reviews. To work around that, ensure you inquire your customers to leave you reviews and respond to all reviews left for you.
SEO will aid you attain viewpoints, and social media will help you out to hook up with your present customers. However, its how your customers are entertained that will help your business grow up. If you have a good business, people will locate you.