How to Create a Mobile Friendly WordPress Website

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems used on the web today. Many people may know what WordPress is, but few know how to properly use it for their sites. With over 30 million downloads and a growing user base every year, it would be a shame to not capitalise on this popularity by creating a mobile friendly WordPress website.

What does mobile friendly mean? Well, it means your WordPress website will look the same on mobile phones as it does on your laptop or desktop computer. More importantly, it means that all of the content on your site can be easily accessed on a mobile device. This is because web browsers like Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox make accessing content easier by presenting the contents of a site in a scrollable, readable, and clickable format.

To ensure your WordPress site is as accessible as possible, you should take the following steps:

Make Sure Your Site Is Scalable

A crucial factor to creating a mobile friendly WordPress site is ensuring that the HTML and CSS of your site are scalable. By this, we mean that even when a user clicks on a link or opens an attachment in a new tab, the layout and design of your site should still look as good as it does when viewing it on a large monitor or a desktop computer.

A good example of an unresponsive website is one with a fixed width container. A fixed width container limits how much a user’s viewport can change according to the screen size. For instance, if you have a fixed width container and your viewport is set to 980 pixels wide, then your site will not look good when displayed on a mobile phone with a 480 pixel width screen.

Create Multi-Purpose Layouts

Another important thing to create on your WordPress website is multi-purpose layouts. A good multi-purpose layout will allow you to adapt the way your site looks according to the screen size of the device used to view it. So, if you’re creating a professional looking site with a lot of text and images, you will want to consider using a full-width layout.

The best part about a multi-purpose layout is that it allows you to create different variations of your site. So, let’s say you’re designing a site for a car company and their model line is the Fiat 500. You could create a version of your site with a full-width container and a slanted navigation menu that appears on the left side of the screen when using a small phone or tablet. When viewed on a large screen, such as a laptop or desktop computer, the menu could be brought down to the bottom and hidden behind a logo or text.

Hide Unnecessary Content

Some of the most common things found on the websites of new bloggers are large images with a description beneath them. Usually, these are images that the blogger uses to highlight a particular product or service. While it’s a good idea to include images that attract viewers to your content, you don’t have to show everything you have to offer.

When creating a mobile friendly WordPress website, you should consider hiding any content that is not necessary for the reader’s experience. Therefore, if there is text that goes along with an image, such as a product name or detailed description of that product, you should hide that text using CSS. Doing this will make your content accessible to more people, regardless of whether they have a small screen or a large one.

Create Content-First Websites

WordPress is a content-first CMS, which means that the content is more important than the layout or design when creating a website. If you’re not a natural writer, it can be difficult to write engaging content for your blog. However, you don’t have to be a great writer to create some amazing content for your website.

If you find that most of your content is not interesting to your readers, you should consider creating an about page that acts as a placeholder for information that is not relevant to the topic of your blog. For example, if your blog is about fashion and you don’t feel that your readers will be interested in reading about your travels or culinary escapades, you can put up an about page which includes a brief bio about your fashion journalism career and a collection of your work.

Include plenty of useful links to other WordPress sites, Google blogs, and relevant news articles on major news platforms like The Huffington Post and Tech Radar. You can also use a tool like Google Analytics to track the success of your content marketing strategy. By understanding what content is performing well and diving deeper into why certain content is ranking higher than others, you can determine the type of content your audience is reacting to and continue to create more of that same content.

Avoid Overusing H1, H2, And H3 Tags

When creating a mobile friendly WordPress site, you should take care not to overuse the

,

, and

HTML tags. These tags are often used to highlight important headings and subheadings on a page. However, instead of using these HTML tags to structure your content, you should use other techniques, like bullet points and subheadings.

When used sparingly,

,

, and

tags can still be very useful for structuring your content. For example, if you’re writing an article for Wired magazine about the history of blogging, you may want to use these tags to format your story. But, if you’ve written a guide on how to build a blog focused on fitness, you may want to avoid using these tags altogether.

Incorporate Media Queries

Last but not least, we have media queries. Media queries allow you to specify the layout and design of your website depending on the screen size of the device used to view it. Like we mentioned above, a good mobile-friendly WordPress website has all of its content accessible to everyone, regardless of whether they have a small screen or a large one.

To make sure that your content can be accessed easily on a mobile device, you should include media queries in your CSS. You can test out various layouts and designs on your mobile phone to see how they look. When you’ve found a design that you think is perfect, you can apply that same design to your WordPress site using media queries.