The 6 Best WordPress Plugins to Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
Today we will talk about the best WordPress plugins to optimize web pages.
By 2020, 90% of the world’s population over the age of six will have a mobile phone.
What this means is that if you don’t focus on your website, and specifically improving the user experience and making it mobile friendly, you will lose business.
You have about five seconds to grab someone’s attention and convince them to stay on your website. If your site is down or slow to load, that person won’t come back.
This is why you need to make sure that your site is optimized for mobile devices so that it loads faster.
In addition, it will represent a positive signal for search engines like Google, which means that your site can also have a better organic ranking.
Fortunately, the process of optimizing your website for mobile devices is not rocket science, and you can do it on your own with the help of WordPress plugins.
What is a WordPress plugin?
A plugin or add-on is also called a module (or extension) and is defined as “a piece” of software that adds additional features to your site.
Because WordPress is open source, there are dozens to hundreds of thousands of plugins.
From a technical point of view, they are written in the PHP programming language (which is the basis of the WordPress platform) and are designed to be easily installed from the WordPress admin panel.
You can find a plugin for anything you want.
In fact, plugins are just like mobile apps and can help you implement even the craziest ideas you have in mind. To install a WordPress plugin, you must go to the administration panel, to the plugins section, and select the “Add new” option.
Now that you have a little more context on what WordPress plugins are, as well as what they do, here are our top options for making your site mobile-friendly.
1.WPtouch
When talking about mobile solutions for WordPress, WP Touch is the first thing that comes to mind.
This popular plugin has been downloaded over six million times and replaces your site with an easy-to-use, mobile-focused content theme. It enhances the site, making it faster and easier to read.
WPtouch automatically adds a simple mobile theme to the web, but the overall theme of your website does not change.
Also, your content remains the same. WPtouch simply converts your content for different screens. Your website URL remains the same.
Considering that Google recommends WPtouch, you may also see an improvement in your mobile search rankings, which means your site may appear on the first page of organic search results for specific words and phrases that are relevant to your business.
WPtouch gives you the flexibility to:
- Include or exclude pages.
- Control and change pages and menus.
…depending on what you think is appropriate for each device.
WPtouch has a free option.
With the free version, you only have access to one mobile theme. Along with this come custom features like language detection, color changes, and special elements to help you match your branding, specific coding, and other styling options.
The paid version offers seven different themes, with a higher degree of customization. WPtouch also has a mobile cache option, which supports images, ad serving, and A/B testing.
The best feature of this plugin is how easy it is to configure it. Once enabled, your site will be automatically optimized for mobile devices without changing any settings.
You can also choose to switch between the mobile version and the regular theme.
2.Wp Super Cache
One of the best options when it comes to optimizing websites, Wp Super Cache is rated almost five stars and is free. With over 1 million downloads, people love the variety of features this plugin offers.
Wp Super Cache can help improve the loading speed of your website and can be installed in parallel with Auto Optimize.
A caching plugin like Wp Super Cache saves your site pages and makes them faster, without having to load all the WordPress scripts.
The difference is immediately visible if you test the speed with a tool like GT Metrix. In short, it helps increase loading speed, especially during times of heavy traffic and/or when your web server is slow.
This plugin converts dynamic PHP codes, which are hard to read by servers, into static HTML files. And the best part is that your site visitors won’t notice a difference, even at times when traffic to your website is high.
WP Super Cache requires little to no configuration, making it perfect for beginners. If you are not familiar with the technical side of caching, you can simply activate the plugin and let it do its thing.
3. Jet pack
Jetpack is much more complex than WP Super Cache and comes out of the box with a set of features designed to help increase web traffic, protect and keep readers engaged.
This plugin provides a wide range of fully configurable functionality directly from the admin panel, including:
- Traffic tracking statistics.
- Social sharing buttons.
- Newsletter Subscription Options.
- Personalization of the user profile of the site.
- Grammar tips for articles.
- A photo gallery.
- A CSS editor.
Some of the most popular features of JetPack include:
- A related posts option, which allows similar articles to appear at the end of each piece of published content. This option helps traffic as people who liked an article will be able to navigate to other pages on your site to see similar types of content.
- CDN Images, so you can download images to your servers, which in turn will help your site load faster.
- Site statistics so you can monitor traffic to your site and see which pages and/or blog posts are the most popular.
- The ability to automatically post your messages on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
- Social sharing options so readers can share your content.
- XML Sitemaps so you can easily create a sitemap and send it to Googlebots for crawling.
- Site monitoring: Jetpack will monitor your site every 5 minutes to see if it is still up and available.
- A contextualized sidebar is available so you can dynamically modify what is visible.
- A more advanced comments section than is standard in WordPress.
- A contact form builder so you can add forms to your website quickly and easily.
Jetpack was designed to be useful to everyone. The advantage of this specific plugin is that you will have access to all these features without installing any other plugin.
4.Auto Optimize
Whether you have classic web hosting through a company, or just run your site through WordPress.com, Auto Optimize is one of the best plugins to improve web load speeds. Optimize your database, clear cache and add scripts.
In fact, Auto-Optimize can reduce the load time of your sites by up to 30%, which is huge, because the longer it takes to load your site, the more likely someone is to leave it. This has been proven time and time again in numerous global surveys.
This plugin is also free and easy to use, so you can rest easy knowing that you don’t need advanced web optimization knowledge to put it to good use.
5.Hummingbird
The Hummingbird plugin will scan your site, find out what’s slowing it down, and suggest one-click fixes ranging from:
- Caching: Hummingbird provides a full suite of caching to load pages faster with tools specifically designed to handle pages, Gravatar images, and browser caching
- Asset Optimization – Customize your files upload position, compress, minimize, reorder and merge files for best performance
- GZIP compression: faster transfer of HTML, JavaScript and style sheets
With these fixes, you’ll benefit from faster page loads and PageSpeed scores. The most important thing is that your website visitors will also be happier.
6. Asset CleanUp: Page Speed Booster
Most plugins insert their code on every page, regardless of whether they are being used on that page. This allows the plugin to work properly whether you decide to use its feature on all pages or just a couple of pages.
A good example is some plugins used to create contact forms. Typically, you use these types of plugins only on a contact page, not every page on your site.
However, these plugins inject their CSS and JavaScript files into every page by default.
To improve the speed of your website and make the HTML source code cleaner, it is much better to prevent those styles and scripts from loading on pages where they are not used.
The Asset CleanUp plugin has become one of the favorite plugins.
It solves this problem by scanning each page and detecting all assets that are loaded. All you have to do when editing a page/post is select the CSS/JS codes that are not needed to load.
As a result, your website can:
- Decrease the number of loaded HTTP requests (important for faster page load) by dumping useless CSS/JS.
- Shrink/Merge the remaining loaded CSS/JavaScript files.
- Reduces the HTML code of the current page.
- Get a better performance score if you test your URL on websites like GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights, or Pingdom Website Speed Test.
This is really a powerful plugin to improve site speed!
Final Arguments for Using WordPress Plugins to Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
Search engines like Google put a lot of emphasis on mobile-optimized websites, and this trend will continue as we rely more and more on wearable technology.
The good news is that if you have a WordPress website , there are numerous plugins available that can help you better optimize your website for smartphones and tablets without a great deal of technical knowledge.
Just make sure you don’t get carried away with the number of plugins you decide to use, as if you install too many, you risk ruining your site’s performance, which is what you’re trying to optimize.
Also, keep in mind that installing multiple plugins that essentially do the same thing may cause one or both of them to not work properly.
Pro Tip : To help with these checks and balances, before installing a new plugin, consult WPEngines list of disallowed plugins.
There are a number of plugins like Broken Link Checker and some post related plugins which used to be always recommended. Now these plugins can slow down websites, despite their useful application.
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