We’ve recently been revisiting some of our old WordPress projects. One of the projects we worked on included building a number of publisher sites. We originally worked on the project as far back as 2010. These sites were set up to scrape product feeds from an affiliate network and automatically generate posts for all these products. We’ve recently built a new site along these lines. That site uses a slightly different approach and newer technology, so we’ll write about that soon.
Optimising your mobile experience
It wasn’t until a few years later that responsive web design really became a thing. As you can imagine then, these sites weren’t particularly mobile-friendly. When we were looking to relaunch these sites earlier this year, we would definitely need to do something about that. We could have completely rebuilt the front-end of these sites, but we actually really liked the retro design! In came WPtouch.
We have to say we were blown away with how easy it was to set WPtouch up. We made just a few minor tweaks to the settings and we were up and running with a mobile site. In cases where you have an older non-responsive site, this is perfect for you. It might be that the free version of WPtouch can improve your mobile experience, even when you have a responsive theme in place.
What do we tweak? First of all we set up a dedicated landing page for mobile. The content was exactly the same, it’s just we tweaked it to display better on mobile. Next we created a different menu for mobile to make the site easier to navigate. Then we used the customiser feature of WPtouch to change the colour scheme to be in line with the desktop design. We also uploaded a logo and picked the menu animation style we wanted, which for us was off-canvas. There are also a few options around layout and post settings, like changing your font. Finally, there is the ability to integrate social media channels. All-in-all, a very good plugin.
Why should you optimise your site for mobile devices?
There are lots of reasons, but the main ones are:
- Better user experience – optimising the look and accessibility of your site on mobile devices must have a positive affect on conversion
- Better SEO ranking – Google loves mobile-friendly versions of sites, so having a mobile version will automatically improve your mobile rankings
Interested in our typical WordPress website set up? Learn more here.