Without a mobile-friendly website, your WordPress site may suffer in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) – and you could even lose customers over poor usability. However, adding mobile features to your site may seem like an insurmountable task if you’re not a web developer.
Thankfully, there are simple solutions for making your website mobile-ready without requiring any coding knowledge! There are many WordPress mobile plugins available to help equip your website with a mobile-friendly interface when viewed on a phone or tablet. This is particularly helpful when your site’s theme hasn’t yet been optimized for mobile phones.
In this article, we will explore possible solutions for creating a mobile-friendly site, show you the top WordPress mobile responsive plugins, and help you decide which one is right for you. Let’s get started!
Do You Need a WordPress Mobile Plugin?
Google offers a free tool to test for mobile-friendliness.
Nowadays, as mobile-friendliness becomes a non-negotiable issue, many themes are already designed to look great on any device. However, this isn’t the only approach for offering mobile solutions to your visitors! Here are three main ways you can make your WordPress website mobile-friendly:
- Run a mobile-specific theme when a device is detected.
- Turn your website into a web app on mobile, which is served when a device is detected.
- Use a responsive design that is optimized to behave well on all platforms regardless of device.
To determine whether your site is currently optimized for mobile devices, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly tool. If it turns out your site doesn’t have responsive design (or fails the test for other reasons), a WordPress mobile responsive plugin may be right for you. You can also decide to choose a plugin if you’re not satisfied with your current theme on mobile.
Best WordPress Plugins for Mobile Friendly Sites
The most popular WordPress mobile plugin options come in either free or ‘freemium’ options. The latter simply means that while the base version of a plugin is free, there’s an opportunity to pay for upgrades. Popular mobile responsive plugin features include:
- The ability to customize themes using a visual interface.
- Being able to select from a variety of themes.
- Excluding or including themes for certain devices.
- Extra enhancement abilities for a fee.
For smaller sites, you can probably get away with simpler mobile themes, as there won’t be as much of a need to build advanced enhancements for your users. On the other hand, if your website supports eCommerce or other fancy features, the plugin you choose should support your existing site’s functionality.
Let’s take a look at a few of the more popular options.
WPtouch Mobile Plugin
WPtouch Mobile Plugin is one of the oldest and most popular mobile plugins for WordPress. Its features include advanced theme customization, even on their free level, as well as compatibility with popular caching plugins.
You can try the plugin for free, but if you need more options for customizing your theme, check out their premium version, which starts at $69.00 USD.
Jetpack
Jetpack is a comprehensive plugin that helps you add a lot of WordPress.com-like support to a WordPress.org site installation. This includes page likes, sharing, automatic posting, advanced comments, additional default shortcodes, an image Content Delivery Network (CDN), and much more. What’s more, it offers a mobile-ready theme to turn on for your site.
Automattic provides Jetpack for free and offers paid upgrades for services such as automatic backups of your site. However, a simple mobile-ready theme is included without charge. This can be a great way to try mobile theming without spending money upfront.
WordPress Mobile Pack
WordPress Mobile Pack isn’t just a mobile theme, but a complete progressive web application for your site. You can choose between multiple themes, customize display options, and also upgrade for better branding options on your site. Your progressive web app should perform phenomenally even on a slow data connection, be able to push native notifications to device users, and will feature a responsive UI for all screen sizes and orientations.
If you want a highly professional interface that offers a native look for your mobile users, this may be a good option for you. Premium versions of WordPress Mobile Pack start at $99.00 USD.
AMP for WP – Accelerated Mobile Pages
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a set of code standards created by Google to speed up news articles and blog posts found in search for mobile devices. This plugin, AMP for WP, isn’t a mobile theme so much as an alternate portal for your site designed specifically to accommodate users coming in from Google Search.
Even so, your AMP posts should load at ridiculously fast speeds and will enable you to cater to organic search traffic. The plugin is free, but premium support starts at $39.95 USD. You can also buy extensions to support popular plugins such as Contact Form 7 on your AMP pages.
What’s the Best WordPress Mobile Plugin for You?
The WordPress mobile plugin that works best for you depends on your priorities for your website. You may want to simply amp up performance for search traffic, or run a full-on unique mobile web application for your site.
If you already run your site using a responsive theme, but simply want to deliver a stellar experience for Google search users, try a plugin such as AMP for WP. On the other hand, if you want to try out mobile theming and would like to support a host of other administrative features and extra shortcodes, Jetpack is a risk-free solution. For customizable mobile themes, WPtouch is probably the way to go. Finally, if you want to deliver a native-feeling progressive web app, WordPress Mobile Pack is the best solution on this list.
As we’ve touched on, one of the most important elements of optimizing for mobile devices is speed. The underlying speed factor comes down to having a reliable, highly optimized WordPress host such as WP Engine. Our servers are designed to make your website fly for mobile website visitors!