5 Ways to Optimize Your WordPress Site for Mobile

Most people have optimized their site in one way or another, but have you ever done anything specifically for your mobile visitors?

Many sites are not optimized for mobile beyond a simple responsive theme. Moving your site layout around for small screens is not enough to engage and convert your mobile visitors. You have to make sure your mobile site is fast, easy to use, and designed specifically for small screens.

To ensure that doesn’t happen, it’s critical you work on your mobile user experience. Let’s look at 5 ways you can optimize your site today.

People expect sites to load quickly on mobile, especially when they are on the go. Faster load times can increase conversions and decrease bounce rates, while slow load times will send them to your competitors.

Here are 3 things you can do right now to speed up your site for mobile.

Large images can slow down your page load times tremendously. The good thing is that it’s a pretty easy fix.

Responsive images also help with load times, and lucky for you they are already in WordPress core since version 4.4. You don’t have to do anything to use those if you are up to date.

Bad plugin and theme code can sometimes cause a bottleneck for your site speed, even if you optimize everything else.

This can get fairly complex, but a great place to start is with HTTP requests, or wpdb queries. According to Pagely CTO Joshua Eichorn, these are the worst offenders they come across in supporting their hosting customers.

You are reading this on Pagely, so chances are that you already have a great host.

Responsive design is important, but it’s not enough to simply purchase a responsive theme.

The problem is that a responsive theme is not enough. All it does is move your content around for small screens, but it doesn’t account for the fact that mobile users need to see different things than desktop users. I’m not saying you should remove features or content, it just needs to be designed more intentionally.

For example, if you have a restaurant website, mobile users probably just want to see your menu, hours, and how to get to your location. Desktop users may have the ability to scroll through more images of your site, read your blog posts, and opt-in to your newsletter, but you don’t want to bog down your mobile users with too much of that. If you just have a responsive theme, you are not able to intentionally show mobile users what they want quickly.

At the beginning of the article, I mentioned that mobile internet usage has surpassed the desktop. The thing I didn’t mention is that most of the internet time on a device is spent in apps.

Part of mobile optimization is designing a holistic mobile experience for your audience, and for many businesses that includes a native mobile app. Apps allow for a faster, more focused experience, as well as features that are not available on the web. For example, offline access and push notifications.

You can also distribute through the iOS and Android app stores, which gives you another point of contact to engage with your customers.

Google offers some help to website owners who are working on improving their mobile SEO.

After you fetch your site as Google, it will show you any problems with your site that you need to fix.

If you are using a popup plugin or app download interstitial, make sure it doesn’t block the whole screen on mobile. Instead, use a less intrusive banner, or deactivate popups for mobile.

Your font size should be legible on mobile. I prefer a large mobile font of 16px. Your long-form articles should be one-column with no sidebars on a small screen. Also make sure any buttons or tap targets are at least 44px high, which is the desired size according to Apple.

If you go through all the work of optimizing for mobile, make sure you track how well you are doing.

Google Analytics can track mobile visits separately from desktop, using a feature called segmenting. Using this feature, you can see how much of your traffic is mobile, where it’s coming from, and what pages are being viewed.

To enable a mobile segment, log into your Google Analytics account and go to Audience. Click where it says “Overview” (if it’s not there already) then click “Add Segment” towards the top of the page. This will show you all of your available segments, and you can choose “Mobile Traffic.”

You can uncheck “All Traffic” to see mobile only, or leave it checked for a comparison. Click the blue “Apply” button underneath the segments, and now you will see your new segmented data.

You should now be able to see the percentage of mobile-only traffic to your site, and you can click on other navigation items to see other data. For example, if I go to Behavior => Site Content => All Pages, I can see that my pricing page is the #1 visited page on mobile. I assume people are researching, and want to see how much my product costs.

With the mobile segment enabled, you can now compare different dates, and hopefully see increased engagement on mobile as you apply these optimization tips.

As mobile usage continues to grow, it’s critical that you improve the mobile experience on your website.

If you do nothing else, focus on speeding up your page load time for mobile users. It is by far the most important thing you can do. A responsive theme will help improve your site’s readability on small screens, but you should also consider designing a mobile-only experience. Don’t take features away from the site, just make sure your mobile visitors can find what they are looking for quickly.

A mobile app might be a great way to engage with your audience in a new way, allowing them offline access to your content and a more focused experience. Finally, make sure you track your progress with Google Analytics or another platform, because what gets measured gets done.

Related posts:

Back in December 2015, I was busy with my final year project towards the completion of my engineering degree. I had another semester left to complete my project. Therefore all the force was directed…

Two robots traverse the desert floor. Explosions from a decades-old conflict have left a pockmarked and unstable territory, though many more improvised bombs lie concealed in its vast reaches…

Why Black History Is Important. This month is black history month in the UK. As people of colour we have been through and still go through seasons of difficulty and storms….