Last Updated on December 10, 2016 by Dave Farquhar
I took some steps this weekend to make the site more mobile-friendly. I get a lot of traffic from tablets and phones, so I figure the better their experience, the more likely they are to stay around. Fortunately it’s not hard to make WordPress more mobile-friendly.
First, I switched to a 2-column format. On small screens, two columns display better than three.
Next I installed a plugin called definitely-allow-mobile-zooming. This forces your page to allow zooming on mobile devices, since some CSS disallows it. On some devices my page worked fine without it, but Google’s tools flagged me as mobile-unfriendly until I installed it.
Google is going to start tweaking search results based on whether the searcher is on a desktop or a mobile device and favor sites that render well under the searcher’s conditions, so these adjustments are worth making if you value search engine traffic.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
Which Google tool did you use to see that they had flagged your website as not mobile friendly?
Sorry, here’s the link:
http://bit.ly/1EVi9R3
I got my monthly e-mail from Google and was informed that of 14,000 pages scanned, 14,000 failed their mobilty test. Ouch.
I installed the wp-touch plugin. It creates a different theme for mobile users. There are different themes you can choose and some color choices. It’s not super configurable, but it did fix my immediate problem in roughly two minutes.
I had wp-touch installed for a while, but like you say, it doesn’t have much in the way of configuration options, so instead I opted for this other approach. It’s not optimal either, but I needed more flexibility than wp-touch had been giving me.