Is Your Blog Mobile-Friendly?
How often do you use your mobile device (iPhone or tablet) to surf the internet? Chances are, pretty often. Now think about the people who read your blog. Are they reading your blog on their laptop, desktop or mobile device? It’s been shown that the number of people using the internet are doing so on a mobile device. In order to keep visitors on your site, make them come back and have a good user experience, your blog or website should be mobile-friendly.
What does mobile-friendly mean?
Note: You may also see this described as “responsive design”. Responsive design will automatically adjust your website to fit the device you’re reading it on. It will take the content and layout and make it fit the resolution of the device.
Before making sure you blog is mobile-friendly, you can log into your Google Analytics account to see just what percentage of your current users are visiting your blog via a mobile device. Log in to your account and head over to the “Audience section”. Then select “Mobile” > “Overview”. Now you can see the amount of traffic that comes from mobile devices. Under “Devices”, you can see which mobile devices your visitors use. I would say that if the percentage is above 25%, you should seriously invest in making your website mobile-friendly.
Why should my blog be mobile-friendly?
Besides the fact that more and more people are using mobile devices as one- or the only- way to browse the internet, you would be dumb not to! Another large reason is speed. If your site is not mobile-friendly, then the website will take forever to load on a phone or tablet. No one wants to wait an entire minute for an article or webpage to load, right? Mobile-friendly sites load more efficiently and appear easier to read, making the overall user experience better.
How do I tell if my blog is mobile-friendly?
For starters, you can view your blog on a mobile device, like your iPhone. If images don’t scale down to size, the text is hard to read, etc., then you know it is not mobile-friendly. If you don’t think it’s easy to navigate around your website through the small device, then you should probably change it.
After that, I would suggest testing out your website on the following websites. They will tell you if your website is mobile-friendly, what grade your website has, and even what changes you should make to ensure that your website works well on mobile devices.
How do I make my blog mobile-friendly?
If you use WordPress, you can simply download a plug-in, which will automatically make you blog responsive when someone views it on a device. I recommend WP-Touch. Or you can invest in a high-quality theme or framework for WordPress that is already mobile-friendly from the beginning, like Genesis or any other Studiopress Theme. I use Genesis on my blog and highly recommend it- it’s mobile-friendly and great for SEO.
great info, I’ve been thinking about trying out Genesis. I will look into it more.
wordpress has a tonnnn of responsive theme options! My office just got a new responsive design and my friend actually just put out a book on building responsive web designs on wordpress (casabona.org/book/) They always laugh that it’s easy to tell when a person works in web because every time they pull up a new site they play with the page dimensions to see how it works.
haha that’s true!
Great article Rachel! I definitely believe having a mobile-friendly blog has made a big difference in my traffic and bounce rate! I signed up via Dudamobile because I liked the features and pay for the service, but certainly the free options are great too!
love genesis! whoo!
Well what happens if I use Blogger instead of WordPress? How do I automatically do it then? Help!
Great tips, doll. We just got done doing a whole revamp + new IA of my organization’s site, and all of that included being built using responsive design. A TOTAL CHORE of a project (think content migration hell in the form of spreadsheets and old content management systems), but the new site is soooo much cleaner and obviously readable by any screen size. 🙂
Such helpful tips Rachel! I didn’t know there was a way to track how many visits to your blog are done on a mobile device! Thanks for the info!
There are great tips – too bad the blogger apps aren’t as good!
They really aren’t – you gotta get off Blogger 😉
You always have the most informative posts! I am always learning a lot from your post topics…thank you!
Thank you!
Mine is not mobile friendly and but I’m kind of stumped on how to make it that way. I do have the Genesis theme – is there just a button or something I can press to make it work? I did try that one plugin but hated the way it looked on my iPhone.
I think mine is mobile friendly. I can see everything pretty well on Safari. I get pretty decent traffic from mobile devices. I swear your post about this kind of stuff is so helpful! You are helping so many, including me! Keep it up!! xoxo
aw thank you!
Thanks, Rachel, for these tips! I looked into WPtouch and, for a free option, it looks pretty great!
Thanks for the tips– any suggestions on how to make blogger more mobile friendly? I have very few people using my blog on a mobile device.
This helped a lot! I will definitely be checking my stuff to see how mobile friendly I am 🙂