Making your WordPress blog mobile-friendly has become extremely important for both your website visitors and search engines. The number of people surfing the internet on mobile devices has increased rapidly in the last couple of years. Google recently decided to add responsiveness as a ranking signal in their search algorithm too. So, mobile-friendly websites are a must in today’s date. To help you in the same, I am listing 10 WordPress plugins and themes to make your WordPress website mobile-friendly.
1. Jetpack: Jetpack plugin by WordPress.com has got a mobile theme hidden in its settings. Once Jetpack is installed in your website, just go to Jetpack settings and scroll down where you would find “mobile theme” listed. Click on “activate” and you are done. However, changing colors and other major customizations are not available.
2. WPtouch: WPtouch is the oldest and most popular mobile plugin for WordPress. Once activated, the plugin enables a simple yet elegant mobile theme for mobile visitors of your website. WPtouch enables you to change several aspects of the mobile theme and also provides your visitors an option of switching between the mobile site and the regular website.
3. Any Mobile Theme Switcher: Any Mobile Theme Switcher is an excellent plugin that detects mobile browsers and redirects your visitor to a secondary responsive theme based on your settings. You can enable a secondary or even multiple different themes based on the mobile browser. Some of the devices and browsers which are auto-detected by the plugin include iPhone/iOS, iPad, Android Phone, Android Tab, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Palm OS etc.
4. HandHeld: HandHeld is a premium mobile plugin that automatically detects mobile browsers and serves them with a beautiful alternate layout. You can choose between multiple colors, customize the colors in various parts of the theme, manage ads and adjust several other settings. You can also be sure that the theme would be updated for any bug fixes or other problems in the future as ElegantThemes are known to provide perpetual updates to all their themes and plugins.
5. Metro Mobile Theme: Metro mobile theme is an elegant metro style mobile theme with beautiful tiles and icons. There are 13 different metro size tiles and 24 real metro colors (+ unlimited with custom colors).
6. WiziApp: WiziApp is an excellent plugin that allows you to choose a mobile theme and to create your own native iPhone and Android App and publish to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store respectively. The plugin also allows you to display advertisements on your mobile app. However, the free version also displays their ads on the mobile site which can be removed by upgrading to a pro version.
7. Mobile Smart: The Mobile Smart plugin allows your website to switch to a mobile theme if someone visits your website using a mobile device. The plugin also adds conditional template tags in order to insert conditional content.
8. WordPress Mobile Pack: WordPress Mobile Pack helps website owners to covert their blog into a mobile app compatible with several mobile operating system including iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Firefox OS.
9. WP Mobile Detector: WP Mobile Detector plugin automatically detects the type of mobile device used by your website visitor and serves a theme based on the type of device. The plugin can detect over 5,000 mobile devices and loads a compatible mobile theme for each. There are multiple mobile themes in the plugin and the plugin also includes an installer that will configure everything automatically.
10. Device Theme Switcher: Device Theme Switcher is another very good theme switcher which can be configured based on the mobile browser. You can set a separate theme for your desktop version, mobile version, tablet version and a separate one for those devices which lack complete support for CSS and Javascript too.
I have intentionally excluded those mobile themes and plugins in the list which are not actively suppported or updated anymore. If you know of and would like to add any other actively maintained theme or plugin, please feel free let us know by commenting below.
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