226 – Getting Your Site Mobile Ready

Announcements

• April WordPress Webinar
  • Create a Password Protected Membership Site
  • April 3rd at 10am EST
  • Register Today!
• Running Jetpack Chrome Extension or see if site is using WordPress with Appspector
• WordPress 4.2 Beta 3
• domcomp.com is a great search tool that will allow you to find the perfect domain name with the correct extension by searching hundreds of different registrars.

Is there a plugin for that?

With more than 50,000 plugins in the WordPress repository, it’s hard to find the perfect one. Each week, I will highlight an interesting plugin form the repository.

For more great plugins, download my 50 Most Useful Plugins eBook.

Responsive Tabs is a plugin that will allow you a responsive and clean way to display your content. Create your new tabs in a special custom post type and paste the shortcode into any post or page.

Getting Your Site Mobile Ready

At the end of February 2015, Google announced that they would be making some changes to the way that search results will be displayed on mobile devices:

When it comes to search on mobile devices, users should get the most relevant and timely results, no matter if the information lives on mobile-friendly web pages or apps. As more people use mobile devices to access the internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns. In the past, we’ve made updates to ensure a site is configured properly and viewable on modern devices. We’ve made it easier for users to find mobile-friendly web pages and we’ve introduced App Indexing to surface useful content from apps. Source

Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.

WordPress.com sites are already mobile ready / responsive.

Self-hosted WordPress
– Make sure you are using the latest version of WordPress
– Update your themes if an update is available
– Check your URL with the Mobile Friendly testing tool

Options to Convert to Mobile Friendly
– Look for a new theme
– Install either Jetpack, WPtouch, WP Mobile Detector to create a mobile version of your site
– Customize your code to make your current theme mobile-friendly

For more information, please see the Getting Started page.

Call To Action

• Sign up for next webinar
• Get your site mobile friendly by April 21, 2015.