Latest studies made on mobile users are more than revealing. They show that two-thirds of mobile users go online using their smartphones or other mobile devices. The number of users playing internet on mobile is one third of those who access internet via desktop or laptop computers. If you run an online business, go and check out your analytics, you'll be amazed to see that a huge chunk of visitors coming to your website using their smartphone devices.
The key takeaway is that mobile users are precious and in order to keep them coming to your website, you need to optimize it for mobile devices. The website should have mobile optimized design and content and should load faster. WordPress, the finest open source platform gives a number of plug-ins that can be used to optimize user experience. Find here a few of them.
Best WordPress Mobile Theme Plugins:
These plug-ins are some of the most popular from the WordPress family and offer fully-loaded mobile themes. These plug-ins have been developed having mobile users and their relative mobile experience in mind. They are lightweight and fast. Let's look at top three that I prefer.
WP Touch:
The plug-in tops the chart as the most preferred theme, and has been downloaded over six million times. It overhauls your standard mobile website with an elegant and content-based mobile theme. Websites made using this plugin are fast loading, easy to read and deliver an awesome user experience. WP Touch theme is available for download both in free and paid versions. Free version of the plug-in offers a single mobile theme and some basic customization options.
Using free version, developers may change language, color and typography of the website to a limited extent. Its paid version gives developers choice to choose from as many as seven themes. These different templates are designed as per website needs. The key features of the paid version are mobile caching option, support for responsive images as well as the possibility to post ads and A/B split test them.
The theme is easy-to-setup and activate. Once you activate the theme, your site will be automatically optimized for mobile users, without changing any settings. Besides, users are also given the choice to switch between the mobile-only site and your regular theme.
iThemes Mobile:
This is another among top WordPress plug-ins, but available in premium-only option. You'll be short at luck if looking for free version. The plug-in offers four customizable themes to display your posts and pages. It enables users to create their own custom themes as well.
Using the iThemes Mobile plug-in, users can easily change the font styles, headlines, navigation menus, and mobile-only header image. The best part of this plug-in is that it allows assigning different themes to different platforms. That means, a user can customize his site for iOS and Android users and change its look across various devices.
Jetpack Mobile Theme:
This is my personal favorite. It's more than easy to set up and activate this plugin. Once activated, the theme offers a very innovative and uncluttered interface that makes browsing easy for the site visitors. Since, the theme is lightweight, it improves website loading time incredibly.
The theme combines amazing customization features including displaying excerpts or full version of posts, custom menus, custom header images, as well as backgrounds. Unlike other plug-ins, Jetpack will also display a sidebar for mobile users.
Mobile Detect:
This top WordPress plug-in is specifically meant for mobile content optimization. The Mobile Detect plugin offers a number of shortcodes to determine which part of the content is displayed for which device. Using shortcodes, users can include or exclude parts of the content for phones, tablets, or desktops. These shortcodes make life even simpler by allowing model-specific content placement, like content only be visible on iPads. If used alongwith an existing responsive website theme, the theme could be very useful.
