4 WordPress Plugins To Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly And Responsive

Welcome to “Plugged In” where we take a look at WordPress plugins across different categories. This week we look at how to make your WordPress site more responsive and mobile-friendly through a WordPress plugin.

Looking good on a phone and tablet isn’t just an option anymore — it’s a requirement. Last November, mobile usage surpassed desktop usage on Black Friday for the first time in history. This only shows the scope of importance for mobile-friendly design and responsiveness to deliver the best online experience possible.

To be mobile-friendly and responsive means you want your site not only to load fast, but it also must be easy to navigate, text must be easy to read, pictures must load correctly, and forms should submit properly. In other words, the user experience should be phenomenal.

Although it can be tricky to make your website aesthetically pleasing and easy to use on mobile, these plugins can help you attain responsiveness and mobile-friendliness.

WPtouch Mobile Plugin

With WPtouch you can easily make your WordPress site mobile-friendly. The plugin adds a simple and elegant theme for mobile visitors without negatively affecting search engine rankings or making you create a new URL. Another benefit to this plugin is any theme you choose will pass the Google Mobile test, meaning your website will be tagged as mobile friendly.

While free, the Pro version costs $69 upwards, which is a good investment if you want an expanded selection of themes and extensions for your mobile site.

Touchy: A WordPress Mobile Menu Plugin

Given a mobile screen’s smaller size, its navigation cannot be as complex as a larger screen. With Touchy, you can easily translate your desktop site to be tailored for a smaller screen, offering a flawless browsing experience. Through its mobile-focused usability features, you are given complete control with how you want your mobile site to look while still keeping parts of your desktop site intact.

Superfly — Responsive WordPress Menu Plugin

Let’s face it, aside from beautiful aesthetic, easy navigation is one of the most crucial components of a great user experience. Superfly is a top choice by many when it comes to building a 100 percent responsive WordPress menu that’s user-friendly on both desktop and mobile.

The plugin promises to make website navigation easier by removing extra clicks while also providing a ton of customization options, like enhanced mobile support, a styling menu, and displaying control for different pages.

AMP

A responsive, mobile-friendly site is all for nothing if your site fails to load fast. Implementing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) on your WordPress site will make your mobile pages load instantly through its lightweight framework. This is because the open-source AMP works to strip all extraneous “fluff,” leaving you with a lean, stripped-down mobile version of your site. This is a great option for sites with a ton of content (like news sites) and can also help your content rank better on search engines.

See here to learn more about integrating AMP into WordPress as well as some additional ways to speed up your WordPress site.

You can then conduct a WordPress Speed Test to get a full analysis of what could be affecting your site’s performance. That way, next time a user visits your desktop or mobile site, not only will it be responsive and mobile-friendly, but content will load in the blink of an eye!