How To Make Your Website Mobile Friendly

Do you know how many customers are coming to your website each day/week using their mobile, discover how to make your site mobile friendly to give them the best experience.

You only have to watch people using smartphones and tablets (e.g. iPads) all around the place. Google produced a report showing that we have become multiscreen consumers of media. Even TV shows and news programmes now are embracing this, encouraging viewers to Tweet e.g. BBC news, download an app and play along e.g. X-Factor.

But many businesses seem to not connect this increase in mobile browsing with their business. The fact is that typically 10% (1 in 10) of customers are coming through to your site using mobile – and that is conservative; for many businesses is much higher some of our clients are seeing up to 46% (restaurant). If that mobile experience isn’t good you could be losing potential customers.

• With more potential customers coming to your website on mobile give them amobile friendly experience.
• Mobile customers want information – priotise the content and making it easy to find you, call you or find the most important information e.g. restaurant opening hours.
• Time matters – having a fast mobile site = lower bounce rates on mobile = more potential customers

How To Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

The first thing to do is to understand how much traffic is coming from mobile devices. To do this login to Google Analytics. On the left hand menu go to Mobile click here and it will show you how many visitors are coming to your website via mobile and on what device. The bigger the percentage the more critical it is to be mobile.

It is also worth testing how friendly your website looks on a mobile or tablet; here are a few tools:

• MobiReady – test your dotMobi and W3C mobileOK compliance
• W3C mobileOK Checker
• iPadPeek

Here are some options on how to make your site mobile friendly. Choosing the right method will depend on your existing site and what you are trying to achieve.

How To Make Your Site Mobile – WordPress Options

1

Use A Responsive Theme

A responsive WordPress theme helps by changing the layout to fit mobiles. Most new themes from leading suppliers like WooThemes and Genesis have a great range of responsive themes. This is probably needs to be tied in with producing a new website.

2

WP Touch Pro

WPtouch Pro is a simple WordPress plugin that transforms your WordPress site into a mobile friendly version. Some of the main features of WPTouch Pro include: easy customization options, themes and an easy to use admin panel. Pricing for a single WordPress site is $59.

2

WPTap

WPTap provide a range of mobile themes that you can buy and easily setup for mobile. Themes are priced at $49 or lower. The WPTap plugin converts your site to a mobile version or redirects to WpTap theme. See the YouTube Video.

3

WP Mobile Detector

The plugin detects if a person is using a mobile device and then loads a mobile compatible theme for that device. One of the key features of this plugin is the number of devices it can support, more than 5000 types of mobile devices.

4

MobilePress

MobilePress has some custom themes to choose from as well as some other settings. MobilePress is limited in its ability to customise it unless you start getting into coding and custom CSS, but at a top level it is simple to use.

5

WordPress Mobile Pack

This plugin is has two key features: device adaptation & mobile recognition. It detects the mobile device and the browser and then adjusts your post into suitable pages for the mobile visitor.

6

Duda Mobile WordPress Plugin

Dudamobile provide a great and easy to use plugin that converts your WordPress website into a mobile-friendly site. It syncs with your WordPress site and also provides mobile SEO functions.

Customised Mobile Site Soutions

1

Mobify

Mobify is ideally suited to small to medium sized ecommerce businesses upwards or larger enterprise customers. They provide rapid deployment, scaleable solutions and high speed access. Mobify prices start at $995 per month.

2

MoFuse

For the more technically minded who want to learn how to make your site mobile friendly, can use solutions like MoFuse. They provide a build your own tool kit that can can be highly tailored to your brand – prices for this start at $39 per month. MoFuse also allow you to use custom CSS so you get the look and feel that you want.

3

Onbile

Onbile provides a low cost mobile version of your site using an easy to use intuitive interface to build your mobile site.

4

TribalCafe Mobile Websites

For those of you that want a customized design and don’t want to do it yourselves then we offer our own solution. The popularity of this is growing as businesses recognise the need to be have a fast and effective solution.

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