Top Wordpress Plugins For Mobile Optimization

By Author: Soho Hollis
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More and more people are employing tablets and smartphones each day across the world. Actually, it’s predicted that by the finish of 2014, more people will be making use of their mobile devices to explore the web as opposed to desktop Internet. Fail to know the power of the mobile market, and you surely will miss a chance on opportunities big and small to arrive at a bigger market of patrons.

Fortunately for you, it’s not as technically demanding as you might initially think to optimize your website for mobile use. Consider the following top plugins to get your WordPress website up to par with the rest of the mobile-ready web.

To make website handier for mobile uses, the spotlight is in the following areas:

Offering mobile-optimized design and content: This means ensuring the website fits smaller screens suitably, serves up content to mobile users in a clear way, and offers usability for touch-controlled browsers.

Quick loading time: Mobile Internet is not as quick as wifi or
broadband, thus anything that slows down your website’s loading time can cause untimely abandonment and must ...
... be avoided.

As a result the plugins on the list focus on these areas.

Theme Switchers

While the plugins in this class do not offer plug-and-play solutions, they let you to server your mobile visitors with custom themes. This is helpful if you either do not have a responsive theme, do not like the responsive edition of your theme or want to make additional mobile-precise changes to your website.

1. Any Mobile Theme Switcher

The plugin Any Mobile Theme Switcher will sense mobile browsers and server a pre-defined theme to users accessing your website by means of their tablet. It supports an extensive range of devices from iOS and Android over Blackberry and Windows phones to less frequent devices. A different theme can be chosen for each browser to tailor the user experience further.

A pro edition is obtainable which offers different home pages for different devices, QR-code bookmarking, adding ‘click-to-call’ phone numbers and maintaining the W3 total cache plugin.

2. Mobile Smart

Mobile Smart senses whether a mobile user is accessing your site and will exhibit a preferred design from your current themes. Supported devices take in iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows Phone and over.

Users can also be given the choice to switch between the standard and mobile theme manually. Since Mobile Smart is a theme switcher and not a plugin that complements mobile capabilities or any sort of customization, you will have to build your own mobile website edition.

Mobile Theme Plugins

These plugins give unusually good mobile themes. The themes have been built keeping in mind mobile use and hence are lightweight and quick. Content is frequently reduced to bare minimums and do not share the appearance of the original theme from the get go.

1. WP Touch

When it comes to mobile solutions for WordPress, WP Touch evidently leads the list with more than 6 million downloads. The plugin restores your site with an attractive, content-centric mobile theme. The outcome is easy to use, loads quick, and is simple to read.

WP Touch arrives in a free and paid version. With “Bauhaus,” the free edition of the plugin gives only one mobile theme. It enables basic customization – like changing colors, language detection, and typography – to suit your custom code, brand, and additional styling choices.

In the paid version, you have an option between 7 themes intended for different requirements and websites. It also gives a mobile caching option, support for responsive images in addition to the opportunity to post ads and A/B split test them.

What’s special about this plugin is how simple it is to install. Once turned on, your site will be routinely optimized for mobile users, without altering any settings. Visitors are also offered the option to switch between the mobile-only website and your usual theme.

Paid accounts begin at $49 each year for single-site users. A solution for minimum 5 websites in addition to agency and enterprise versions are obtainable and charge $99, $199 and $349 correspondingly.

2. iThemes Mobile

The iThemes mobile plugin is a best-only choice without a free edition, It gives four customizable themes to show your posts and pages and also gives the opportunity to build your own. You can alter the styling of headlines, fonts, navigation menus and pick a custom, mobile-only header image.

What’s very appealing is that iThemes mobile lets you to allot different themes to different podiums. That means you can tailor your site for iOS and Android users and alter its appearance across a variety of devices.
The functionality of iThemes mobile is stripped down to bare fundamentals. Show of sidebars and widget areas is unluckily not supported natively. More superior users can put in those by customizing obtainable theme files. However, if you are competent enough, then you might decide on coding your own responsive theme instead.

Pricing begins at $45 for personal bloggers, or single-site owners with business and developer licenses wearing price tags of $75 and $150.

3. Jetpack Mobile Theme

The best feature in Jetpack is the analytics. It is chocked full of other handy plugins, together with a mobile theme.

One turned on the dashboard, the theme gives a clean, organized interface, which makes it simple for mobile visitors to examine your website. The makers also took good care to make it lightweight in order to ensure prompt-loading times.

Customization features of the Jetpack mobile theme take in exhibiting quotes or full version of posts, custom header images, and custom menus in addition to backgrounds. You can even put in your own css to regulate the appearance of the theme entirely. Jetpack will exhibit a sidebar for mobile users, unlike other solutions.

As part of the Jetpack plugin collection, this solution is at no cost and obtainable in the WordPress plugin directory.

4. WP Mobile Detector Mobile Plugin

While it is an excellent question why its name consists of the word ‘mobile’ two times, the WP Detector Mobile Plugin is the sole option on this list that will differentiate between regular smartphones and cellphones, and offer a different website version for all. It also tracks access to your site from both types of mobile devices.

The plugin takes in 7 mobile themes, which feature touch-optimized layouts, widgets, collapsible menus and over, but are quite basic in general. Picking one of your offered themes for mobile users is also feasible. The plugin’s UX can be little confusing and it consists of ads for the pro version.

The free edition of this plugin is accepted among users and has been downloaded nearly 260,000 times. A pro edition is obtainable starting at $50.

Content Optimizers

1. WP Mobile Detect

This plugin is pretty different from the rest on the list. While WP Mobile Detect also senses mobile devices to serve up different content for them, its approach is different than employing a mobile-specific theme. Instead, the plugin offers a wide range of shortcode, which can be employed to decide which part of content is showed for what kind of device.

This way you can take in or rule out parts of the content for phones, desktops or tablets. The plugin even goes so far as to let model-specific rules so that parts of your website will, for instance, only be evident in iPads.

If employed together with a responsive theme, this can be relatively useful. One of the major points of criticism of these themes in contrast to mobile-specific solutions is their size. Even though a responsively-designed theme will follow the smaller screen size, it can still be significantly bigger than a theme aimed directly at mobile devices.
WP mobile detect allows you keep out those parts of your content that may otherwise block up your mobile user’s bandwidth and lead them to abandon your website before time. The plugin’s shortcodes offer substantial flexibility to customizing your website to a device or podium.

Media Optimizers

Images and media generally frame the bulk of a site’s load. If you choose against using any of the above mentioned solutions, it is a good thought to at least optimize this sort of content thus reducing your mobile visitor’s bandwidth requirements.

1. WP Smush.it

This plugin WP Smush.it, which is managed by WPMU DEV, links your website to Yahoo’s Smush.it image reduction service. The service minimizes the size of your images by shredding away needless information.

Images frequently contain countless extra data – like gps coordinates, kind of camera used, and creation date – which divide up their size and are of no significance to your site’s users.

The plugin will run involuntarily in the background and optimize images as they are uploaded. Current media files can be optimized in batch. It is a “lossless” tool, which implies the images will not alter their appearance or visual quality.

2. EWWW Image Optimizer

In addition to having one of the top plugin names ever, EWWW image optimizer will routinely optimize images uploaded to your site by changing them to the file format that will generate the smallest size. Consequently, pages will load quicker and employ less bandwidth.
Optimization in volume for accessible media is feasible and the plugin keeps in mind which images have been processed earlier so they won’t be optimized again. By default, the service employs lossless procedures but lossy optimization is also obtainable. It also works with most general image gallery plugins.

3. BJ Lazy Load

For those who do not know, sluggish loading means that rather than downloading all media on a page from the start, media files and images will only be loaded on demand when they become noticeable on screen. That way the early loading size (and time) of a given page or post can be considerably minimized without any damage for the viewer.
BJ Lazy Load is a plugin, which offers this trait. It substitutes all your post thumbnails, post images, gravatar images, and content iframes along with placeholders and loads the content simply when visitors scroll the page. The secreted content will be loaded when it gets near to the browser window. The plugin also routinely serves scaled down images for responsive deign.

PS

To get back to the start: If you frequently find yourself in conversations that are blocked by mobile phone use, a cool way to make your social assemblies less mobile-centric is to have each one put their devices in a heap of the tablet at the beginning.
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