Make Your WordPress Blog Mobile With WPTouch

I’ve written about how much I love WPTouch before, but I wanted to sing the plugin’s praises again here.  WPTouch optimizes your blog for viewing on mobile devices such as smartphones.  Those of us that use our smartphones to read blogs know how terrible it is to try to read a blog that hasn’t been optimized for mobile.

Case in point:  I love the big, bold picture of Katy Perry that went with the last post here.  A great picture really makes a post pop.  But here’s what this blog looks like on my iPhone without using the WPTouch plugin:

That’s pretty much the actual size of what you’d be viewing.  It’s impossible to read with the type that small, so you’ll either start pinching and zooming, or leave (probably leave).  Either way, you won’t be impressed with how my blog looks on your phone.

Now here’s how this same post looks on my iPhone with the WPTouch plugin:

Sigh…isn’t that a thing of beauty?  All of the sidebar and header crap that you don’t need is stripped out, and it’s only the post.  Just gawgeous.  Seriously, you do not realize how awful a blog that hasn’t been optimized for mobile looks, until you add this plugin.

Now, how important is making sure your blog is optimized for viewing on smartphones? I was curious as to this blog’s mobile traffic, so I checked.  So far this year, here’s the percentage of each month’s traffic that’s come here via smartphones:

January – 14%

February – 13%

March – 13%

April – 12%

May – 15%

June – 16%

July – 17%

As you can see, it’s slowly increasing.  Check your own blog’s traffic and see what you find.  BTW those stats are coming from Google Analytics, and don’t include tablets.

But adding WPTouch is a very simple way to instantly make your WordPress blog look ahhhmazing on smartphones.  There is a caveat that it doesn’t play nicely with some themes, but you can always download it and try it out.  The premium version is supposed to solve most of the theme-related issues.  Even if WPTouch can’t work for you, check your blog’s stats and see how your mobile visits is trending.  If you are seeing an increase in mobile visitors like I am, it might be time to go ahead and invest in a solution to make your blog mobile-friendly.