196 – Why You Should Have a Mobile Friendly WordPress Site
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Is there a plugin for that?
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Listener Feedback
Feedback from Chad of Optimwise regarding a few things you can do with
- Check 404’s and fix by redirecting
- Review Analytics and act on them
Why You Should Have a Mobile Friendly WordPress Site
What’s the difference between mobile and responsive?
- Responsive is when the site responds to the size of your device
- Mobile is a site that’s specifically designed for a particular device
- In between mobile enabled site with WordPress plugins
Mobile Usage is Growing
- Over 20% of Google searches are done on the phone
- In the US, 25% of internet users only access the internet on a mobile device
- 25.85% of all emails are opened on mobile phones, and 10.16% are opened on tablets
A Positive User Experience is a Must
If a user lands on your mobile site and is frustrated or doesn’t immediately see what they are looking for, there is a 61% chance they will leave and go to another website. If the experience is good, there is a 67% chance they they will purchase from you.
Social Media and Blogging Bring Mobile Visitors
Since mobile phone usage is becoming dominate, it makes sense that 55% of all social media is consumed on a mobile device. Remember that blog post you tweeted about? More than half of the people who click on that link will be on their phone.
Responsive Sites Adapt to Future Devices
When you have a responsive mobile version of your site, it’s going to look good for any size device, which means you won’t have to tweak your site every time a new gadget comes to the market.
Create a Mobile Website with these Plugins
- WPTouch 3
- Mobile by iThemes
- Duda Mobile Website Builder
- Any Mobile Theme Switcher
- WP Mobile Detector Mobile Plugin
Call To Action
Do you have a mobile version of your site? If not, what are you waiting for?
Hi Dustin! Your mobile site looks quite good, indeed! I want to implement WP touch, but since I do something unusual (blog part of my site is hosted with Tumblr, the rest [pages] is hosted with WP, but both having the same look), I’ll try making my site responsive by myself.
By the way, it’s mentioned that more people are now accessing websites on mobile devices (and I’m the one, too), but do you think the same thing is true when it comes to purchasing/making payments online? Personally, I’ve never purchased anything from my iPhone. I always come to my MacBookPro notebook and purchase/make payments. The same goes to you?
Anyway, keep up, and 200th episode is a month away!
Sep 4, 2014Thank you Dustin for the great info. I listened to this episode and also clicked on your link to episode #126 about WPTouch and have since installed it on one of the sites I admin.
Seeing that I don’t have a web enabled smart phone to test on, the biggest trouble I ran into was trying to get an objective third party opinion as to how the site is displaying on mobile devices. I found several sites that offer to show you the mobile version of your website, some even offer various cell phone models that they will emulate. However, most of them displayed the desktop version of my site while one or two did show the mobile version and even then with varying results. If there is a really good and dependable emulator out there, maybe you can tell us about it in a future episode.
By the way, I wondered why you didn’t mention Jetpack’s feature to make your website mobile compatible. I had been using that on my sites. On the one emulator that seemed to work the best, it showed that when using Jetpack all the sidbar widgets had just been pushed down to the bottom of the page while WPTouch actually removed the widgets which makes the page prettier and it loads faster.
Sep 9, 2014