Betheme is fully responsive so that you can adapt your page perfectly to all devices (laptops, smartphones, and tablets). You can also create different versions of your website specifically designed for each device type, which is perfect if you want to show something special on a particular screen. Whether you’re a web developer or a business owner, Betheme is the perfect place for you to start building your first site without any coding experience required
Here we explore why having a mobile friendly WordPress website is so important and
why you should (if you haven’t already) make it your top priority to get your site optimized for mobile devices.
The way we access information has dramatically changed as of late. With mobile technology on the rise, we spend more time on our mobile devices, reading news on the go, browsing interesting websites and even doing our shopping. Where before we used our computers, we now do those tasks on our smartphones and tablets. In fact, a report from SimilarWeb states that 56% of all traffic online comes from a mobile device, and data from StatCounter revealed that mobile and tablet now gets more usage than desktop. Another interesting statistic comes from a
Another interesting statistic comes from a report by IBM which shows an increase in mobile ecommerce sales during the holiday season. Add to that the fact Google’s announcement made in 2015 which states that Google is taking mobile friendliness into consideration when ranking sites and you can start to see why it’s important to have a mobile-friendly website. And if you are a small business website owner (or is about to
In this article, we will show you how you can test if your website is mobile-friendly, and how to make your WordPress site optimized for mobile devices. We will also take you through, step by step, what you can do to make sure your website visitors get the optimal user experience when visiting your website on a mobile phone. Let’s jump straight into it, how to how to make a WordPress website mobile friendly.
How to Check if Your WordPress Site is Mobile-Friendly
Before checking if your website is mobile-friendly, it’s always useful to know exactly how much traffic you are getting from mobile devices. The easiest way to do this is to use Google Analytics. All you have to do is login to your Google Analytics account and select the corresponding web property for your website. In the left-hand side menu, click on Mobile and then Overview. You will be able to see how many of your visitors are coming from desktop, mobile, and tablet devices. If you are curious which devices your visitors are using when browsing your site, you can get that information by clicking on Devices. Now that you know how much mobile traffic your website is getting, it’s time to see if your website is mobile friendly. There are three tools you can use to check this.
» Google Mobile Friendly Test
The first tool comes straight from Google and it’s very simple and straightforward to use. Open up your browser, go to Google Mobile Friendly Test and enter your website’s URL, then click Analyze. After a brief analysis, it will tell you if your website is mobile-friendly or not. If your website is mobile-friendly you will get a green message telling you so. In case it’s not, the test will tell you your website is not mobile-friendly, show you which errors are causing the problem, and guide you towards helpful resources to make your site mobile-friendly.
» Screenfly
The second tool, Screenfly is slightly more robust. While Screenfly won’t give you suggestions on how to make your website mobile-friendly, or point out any errors, it will let you see how your website appears on various screen sizes, including smartphones, tablets, and even TVs. The usefulness of this tool comes from the fact that your website might have a responsive design, but there might still be elements on your website that don’t display as they should.
» MobileTest.me
The last tool is MobileTest.me. This tool allows you to pick a specific mobile device and after entering your website’s URL you can see how your website appears on that specific device. What makes this tool stand apart from the other two, is the fact that you can actually interact with your website as if you are browsing from that specific device. This is a great way to see how your site works on mobile devices and to test some common elements like sharing buttons and sign up forms.
Take the mobile-friendly test
Your website may look great on one mobile device (like your own personal cell phone), but you really need to test it on a wide range of screen sizes to know if it’s truly responsive. Even if you happen to have a whole bunch of old phones lying around, that can be a time-consuming process to test it on every screen.
To simplify things, Google has gifted us all with a free mobile-friendly testing tool that will tell you whether your site qualifies as “mobile-friendly” or not. Just enter your site’s URL for a quick assessment of your site’s mobile design. If your website is fully optimized for mobile devices, you’ll get an enthusiastic little success message that looks like this:
For all of you developers out there, Google also released a Mobile-Friendly Test API that allows you to test URLs with automated tools. The benefit of this is that you can quickly test more pages, but you can also monitor the most important pages on your site without having to manually turn to the browser tool all the time. Score!
17 Best Mobile-Friendly WordPress Themes for 2022
First, mobile-friendly themes are responsive. This means that the layout and appearance of the page adjusts to best suit the width of the screen. Many modern websites serve as great examples of responsive design. Visit one of your favorites, shrink the browser window, and see what happens.
In WordPress, simply displaying the same site layout on any screen size won’t cut it. A quality theme should automatically adjust the sizes and placement of your page elements for smartphones and tablets.
Second, mobile-friendly themes are lightweight. Whenever someone loads a page of your WordPress site, your web server needs to build the page and deliver the contents to the visitor’s browser. The less extra code and excess features included in your theme, the less work your server has to do to send the page, and the faster your site will load.
Lightweight WordPress websites are especially important for mobile viewing, as mobile devices lack the computing power of desktop devices. This can cause content-heavy pages to lag on mobile — prevent this problem with a speed-optimized theme.
Almost any premium WordPress theme (as well as many free ones) will claim to have one or both of these features. Even then, not all themes are created equally for mobile. So, without further ado, let’s cover some of the best options out there today.
Best Mobile-Friendly WordPress Themes
1. Avada
Avada is one of the best WordPress themes out there, period. Hundreds of thousands of beginners, professionals, agencies, businesses, marketers, and creatives use Avada for their desktop and mobile websites. Avada is mobile-friendly and 100% responsive across all devices, with regular updates to ensure your website remains visually optimized and high-performing at all times.
If you’re in the market for basic or advanced customization options without the need to code, try Avada. Its drag-and-drop visual content editor makes designing, maintenance, and updates simple. And, with the Global Styling feature, you can quickly preview your designs on a range of screen sizes.
2. Divi
Divi is both a multipurpose WordPress theme and a responsive WordPress page builder in one. You can use the Divi Builder to easily customize your module placement, fonts, and colors, then toggle between different screen widths inside the builder and see how your designs adapt.
Divi also comes with hundreds of website packs, which are premade, mobile-friendly layouts for an entire website that you can populate with your content. After installing a pack, there’s much less need to worry about mobile optimization yourself.
3. Porto
Porto is a multipurpose and ecommerce WordPress theme, trusted by more than 73,000 customers. This is a theme that’s packed with features — such as a page builder, a header builder, a footer builder, and a product page builder.
4. Uncode
Uncode is another visually appealing theme that is highly responsive to mobile devices. Jam-packed with powerful features, this theme comes with more than 40 pre-built layouts, each of which can be imported with a single click. The developers have programmed the theme to be lightweight, so your pages will load promptly on slower devices.
Uncode is compatible with several modern WordPress plugins: WooCommerce, Slider Revolution, and Custom Lightboxes to name a few. The theme also has a content block section that lets you create beautiful headers, footers, and replicate sections of content.
5. Sydney
If you’re looking for a theme that’s elegant, but also performs well on mobile devices, take a look at Sydney. This theme is a responsive business theme that’s recommended by the team at Elementor and has been downloaded over 100K times on WordPress.org.
Also included in the theme are features that make it ideal for users looking for mobile-friendly design. These include a customizable scroll-to-top button that makes it easy to navigate to the top of any page, Google AMP support, and responsive typefaces.
6. uDesign
To make your site mobile-friendly, choose any of uDesign’s responsive page layouts — your site will conform to tablet, smartphone, and desktops screens. This responsiveness is coupled with two mobile menu options and SEO optimization to ensure your site will rank higher in organic search results.
7. Betheme
Betheme is a premium WordPress theme with a modern design, powerful features, and an extensive, user-friendly interface. Betheme comes with compatibility with major drag-and-drop page builders such as Elementor, making it easy to create unique, visually stunning websites.
Sources:
https://digital.com/wordpress-themes/mobile-friendly/
https://getflywheel.com/layout/make-wordpress-site-mobile-friendly/
https://blog.hubspot.com/website/best-mobile-friendly-wordpress-themes
Wordpress mobile
Once you’ve optimized your site for mobile view, it’s time to put it to test. If the outcome is good, you’re good to go! Pat yourself on the back. However if the results are negative, simply work on the suggested changes and you’ll be good to go.
11 Best Free Mobile Friendly WordPress Themes
Free Mobile-friendly WordPress Themes are themes that have been designed to go beyond and above when it comes to how well they perform on smartphone devices. This starts with a fully responsive design, which means that the theme adjusts its size automatically depending on the screen size of the device it’s being viewed on. This means that text, images, and interactive elements are legible and easy to use no matter if you’re viewing them on a 26-inch monitor or a 5-inch smartphone device.
Speaking of text, the fonts you use on your website are important as well. Classic fonts are not optimized for the web in 2017. They were totally fine when the only places they were being used were websites that would only be viewed on screen sizes no smaller than 15 inches or in Word documents designed to be printed out on physical paper, but they’re outdated when it comes to the modern web.
WordPress Mobile Pack
This plugin packs some serious guns when it comes to creating a mobile website. Normally a plugin renders a mobile compatible version of an existing website. This plugin goes the extra mile and creates an entire web application using the latest HTML5 technologies.
If you’re unclear on a mobile site and a web-app, this might help. If you’ve used Facebook Lite on the stock Android browser, that’s a mobile site. If you’re using a recent version of Chrome on your phone, you’ll be served with Facebook’s web app.
One of the coolest features of WordPress Mobile Pack is that it allows you to selectively sync different posts, pages and comments based on the target device. It also offers a premium version which has better customization and theming capabilities, integration with Google Analytics and ad-networks like Google AdSense and DoubleClick, offline synchronization, and a ton of other awesome features.
Tip #2: Use Plugins
One of the best things about WordPress is the availability of plugins that make the website owner’s job much easier and more streamlined. Plugins serve a ton of purposes, including helping to make a site mobile friendly.
As a site owner, you’d rather spend your time and effort concentrating on the actual content on your site than all the technical mumbo-jumbo that goes on behind the scenes to make your site function, right? A simple plugin can help to make the content on your site easy to read without having to zoom in a million times or scroll from left to right when trying to read through a paragraph on a phone.
WordPress Mobile Pack. This plugin gives you total control over your website’s mobile version. Domain mapping makes it easy to identify the most popular devices, with a single theme offered in four different color palettes.
WP Mobile Detector. This plugin provides a simple way to optimize your site for mobile devices in no time at all. WP Mobile Detector works with thousands of different smartphones, tablets, web-enabled phones, and so forth, giving your visitor a pleasant experience without you having to spend weeks trying to figure it all out yourself.
Tip #3: Make Your Site Responsive
You’ve most likely visited a responsive website in the past. These types of sites respond appropriately according to the device it’s being viewed on. When being viewed on a desktop, the site is presented one way. When being viewed on a smartphone, it’s presented in another. The same thing happens when viewing the site on a tablet or laptop, or any other mobile device you can get your hands on.
Having a responsive design to your site simply means that it will be customized automatically, no matter what source your viewer is visiting from. Pretty cool, right? Having a responsive website is easy as pie if you’re using WordPress as your site’s platform. All you have to do is find a responsive WordPress theme to suit your website’s style (we can’t stop talking about our fully responsive Total WordPress theme with built-in drag & drop page builder, so you can create any responsive layout you want!).
Sources:
https://www.hoothemes.com/free-mobile-friendly-wordpress-themes/
https://www.wpexplorer.com/wordpress-mobile-optimization/
https://www.wpexplorer.com/mobile-optimization-tips-wordpress/
Wordpress mobile
Free Mobile-friendly WordPress Themes are themes that have been designed to go beyond and above when it comes to how well they perform on smartphone devices. This starts with a fully responsive design, which means that the theme adjusts its size automatically depending on the screen size of the device it’s being viewed on. This means that text, images, and interactive elements are legible and easy to use no matter if you’re viewing them on a 26-inch monitor or a 5-inch smartphone device.
6 WordPress Plugins To Make Your Site Mobile Responsive (2022 Edition)
WordPress is touted as one of the easiest CMS solutions available online. Thanks to the simple and easy-to-use interface, WordPress has become the “de facto” standard for building websites of all sorts and sizes – be it a corporate site, blogging site, e-commerce site, etc.
In 2018, Google gives priority to the sites that are mobile ready. So it has become an essential ranking factor as the number of mobile users is increasing day by day. While the popularity of the WordPress platform is snowballing, at the same time, the demand for responsive websites is also proliferating.
Nowadays our mobile devices have become the most preferred medium to access the Internet. According to an online survey conducted by StatCounter, mobile usage has soared by 70% over the last few months. This clearly indicates, how having a website optimized for mobile devices can help you reach to users far and wide. But, an unfortunate reality is that even today a number of sites on the Internet are not mobile friendly.
WordPress Plugins to make your site mobile responsive
Luckily, you can find several amazing WordPress plugins to make your website mobile responsive. In this post, I have compiled a list of top 6 free plugins that perfectly suit the needs of users, who want to turn their site mobile responsive.
WPtouch
This is one of the most widely used and trusted mobile plugins used for deploying great mobile experience. WPtouch helps create simple and beautiful mobile WordPress site in no time. It automatically adds a simple and elegant mobile theme for mobile visitors to your WordPress website.
It boasts an intuitive administration panel that enables you to customize the look and feel of your theme. Additionally, the plugin helps deliver your mobile visitors a user-friendly and polished version of your website, without tweaking existing code of your desktop theme.
This is an ideal plugin for users who wish to deploy great user experience to both desktop and mobile users. This plugin has more than 200K active installations and requires WordPress version 4.2 or higher.
Any Mobile Theme Switcher
The Any Mobile Theme Switcher plugin is an appropriately named WordPress solution for creating mobile-optimized sites. The plugin works by detecting the mobile browser of the device that’s trying to open your website and displays a theme accordingly based on the pre-set options.
You can set switchable versions for iPhone, iPod, iPad, Palm OS, Android, Android Tab, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Opera Mini, and many others mobile browsers in your admin panel. You can even set different themes for different browsers.
Jetpack by WordPress.com
Jetpack comes packed with tons of great features, and most significantly it boasts “Responsive Design” feature, helping users to shape their site for mobile visitors. This plugin offers an easy and straightforward way to turn WordPress powered sites into mobile responsive sites. Using Jetpack you can instantly create lightweight responsive theme perfectly suited for phones and tablets.
JetPack plugin comes with plenty of customization options and tools that increase visitor engagement. This plugin has more than 5 million active installations and requires WordPress version 4.7 or higher.
WordPress Mobile Pack
WordPress Mobile Pack is a plugin that transforms your website’s content into a progressive mobile web application. Websites powered by WordPress Mobile Pack works perfectly on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. All the major mobile browsers are compatible with it including Safari, Google Chrome, and Android Native Browser.
As this plugin turns your site into a progressive web app, it loads nearly instantly, no matter what kind of network connection the user is on. The mobile web application created by this plugin is sensitive to various screen sizes and orientation changes. That means landscape and portrait orientation have their individual effects on the site’s structure.
You get the ultimate flexibility to customize the appearance and feel of the site. You can customize the colors, fonts, and even add your own logo to represent your brand through the design. WordPress Mobile Pack integrates Google Analytics to your site’s mobile variant so that you can track the audience, location, and retention for further design improvements.
WordPress Mobile Pack makes sure that you never miss a single conversion due to its reader focused layouts. This plugin has more than 10K active installations and requires WordPress version 3.6 or higher.
WP Mobile Edition
WP Mobile Edition works almost same as Any Mobile Theme Switcher. It’s fully optimized for the best performance on iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone and automatically switches the theme for the user when a mobile device is detected.
The mobile switcher feature of this plugin works perfectly and automatically detects whether the visitor to the site is mobile or not. Upon detection, it switches between the primary WordPress theme (for desktop users) or loads a mobile-optimized theme.
It provides the visitors an option to switch between mobile view and your site’s regular theme (and remembers their choice). Visitors can manually switch between desktop and mobile versions. Auto detection is foolproof and never fails because it’s based detector on Mobile Detect project, that means device detection will always stay up to date with latest mobile devices.
Take the mobile-friendly test
Your website may look great on one mobile device (like your own personal cell phone), but you really need to test it on a wide range of screen sizes to know if it’s truly responsive. Even if you happen to have a whole bunch of old phones lying around, that can be a time-consuming process to test it on every screen.
To simplify things, Google has gifted us all with a free mobile-friendly testing tool that will tell you whether your site qualifies as “mobile-friendly” or not. Just enter your site’s URL for a quick assessment of your site’s mobile design. If your website is fully optimized for mobile devices, you’ll get an enthusiastic little success message that looks like this:
For all of you developers out there, Google also released a Mobile-Friendly Test API that allows you to test URLs with automated tools. The benefit of this is that you can quickly test more pages, but you can also monitor the most important pages on your site without having to manually turn to the browser tool all the time. Score!
Use (or create) a responsive WordPress theme
First things first: Double-check your WordPress version and current theme version. If there are pending updates, start with those. I can’t speak for every theme out there, but some updates will contain mobile-friendly elements and may be enough to fix your problems. WordPress 4.4, for example, added some really neat functionality for responsive images (you can read all about that here).
The best mobile-friendly WordPress themes
Realistically, a lot of WordPress themes these days are responsive – it’s probably rarer for a theme to not be mobile-friendly. That being said, before purchasing a theme, double check that it displays well on any screen size. Test out the demo site, scale your browser window, and read any reviews you can find to look for experience from real users.
If you’re happy with what you see, go for it! But if something doesn’t look right, steer clear. Even if you thought it was the perfect match, there are so many WordPress themes to choose from that I guarantee you’ll find another that’ll work for your site.
If you’re looking at free themes, be sure to see what it looks like with your own content in place – as I’m sure you know, things don’t always look quite the same, so make sure it displays your content the way you’d want on mobile.
Not sure where to start? When you host your WordPress site on Flywheel, you’ll get access to over 30 premium StudioPress themes (including the Genesis Framework!) free with your plan. These themes are fully responsive so they’ll look great on any device, plus you can easily swap between them (instead of feeling stuck with the “the one” premium theme you decided to purchase).
How to create your own responsive WordPress theme
I’d recommend using Local to spin up a local WordPress site right on your machine. This free app will allow you to experiment to your heart’s content while never breaking your current site (which is essential when going through a redesign). You can even import your existing site into Local, so you only need to start from scratch if you want to.
There’s also a feature called Live Links, which generates a shareable URL to the local site. This allows you to send it off to a client or pull it up on your phone, so you can easily test how the site looks on a mobile device.
If you create a child theme based on a responsive parent theme, you’re going to be in pretty good shape. If you’re starting from a totally blank slate and creating your own theme, just be sure to use media queries to establish boundaries for the design, and think elements through one at a time.
Sources:
https://www.digitalkube.com/mobile-responsive-wordpress-plugins/
https://getflywheel.com/layout/make-wordpress-site-mobile-friendly/
https://www.hoothemes.com/free-mobile-friendly-wordpress-themes/