Best WordPress Mobile Plugins – WPMayor

How does your WordPress website display on mobile devices? If you haven’t paid any attention to this aspect of your site, you are most definitely missing out on a big market. Nowadays many users access your site from their mobile devices, so it’s worth showing them some love by customising the display of your WordPress site to their mobile device.

Customising your WordPress site for mobile devices

There are two main approaches:

1. Implement a specific theme just for mobile devices
2. Make your site responsive so it will adapt to mobile devices

If you’re building a new site I would recommend going for a responsive design. If you are hiring designers and developers to build your site, they will probably ask for a higher price to make your site responsive, but it’s well worth the investment to build a responsive WordPress theme right from the start.

If on the other hand you already have an established site and you don’t see yourself changing your theme anytime soon, it would probably be overkill and unpractical to convert your theme to a responsive one. In this case it is much more cost-effective and straightforward to use a WordPress mobile plugin such as WP Touch.

WP Touch WordPress Mobile Plugin

WPtouch Pro is a WordPress mobile plugin to add powerful, easy-to-use themes for mobile + tablet visitors. It’s also a theming framework, great for creating mobile & tablet themes for your clients.With this plugin, you can easily optimize your WordPress website for mobile viewing – be it for iPhone, Blackberry, Android or iPad. It works by detecting devices like iPhones, iPads, Android & and more, serving its optimized themes instead of your regular desktop theme. Visitors can always switch back if they choose.

Designing a mobile site is always a challenge due to the smaller screens, you really need to identify what it is that the user is looking for when accessing your site from a mobile device. WPtouch Pro has a lot of features that will easily enable you to express your vision and creativity with your mobile site – without sacrificing usability and accessibility.   But if you aren’t into customization, you can basically use it too as a plug and play mobile theme.

WPtouch Pro also has features for advertising, which is quite unique amongst WordPress mobile plugins. It supports AdSense, AdMob and custom ads. You can also have a very good idea of how many people are viewing your mobile site from the analytics available in the admin panel.

Some of the WP Touch Pro features:

• Easy to navigate user interface
• Display options can be disabled for a “cleaner” interface
• Developer license enables custom theme settings (backend and front end)
• Content is automatically formatted to fit mobile and iPad visitors
• Images are re-scaled and re-positioned based on screen size and orientation
• Supports any type of media
• Web-App mode makes your mobile site available as a standalone site when bookmarked
• Web-App mode can be customized for branding purposes
• Supports Adsense, Admob and Custom Ads
• Child theme support for developers
• Customized CSS
• Compatible with most WP plugins

Here’s a quick video to show you how the default theme will look on a typical WordPress site when WP Touch is activated:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HezeKQyc8A8[/youtube]

Here is the pricing structure for WP Touch Pro

1. Pro Single ($49)– license for one mobile site
2. Pro 5 Pack ($99)– license for five mobile sites (ideal if you have a blog network)
3. Pro Developer ($199)– license for unlimited mobile sites (ideal for developers)

If you’re a developer or WordPress consultant, why not offer your existing clients the possibility of having a mobile version of their site? I guarantee that you will quickly recover the outlay for the pro developer pack and make a good dime in the process, while your clients will be very thankful for providing them with an elegant solution.

Download WP Touch

Of course, there are also a few other free alternatives if you are looking for a WordPress mobile plugin. We are listing them here for completeness’ sake, however I would definitely recommend going directly for WP Touch. WPtouch Pro has thousands of hours of work behind it and I think it’s the most polished, professional mobile plugin available for WordPress.

Alternatives to WP Touch

The below 2 alternatives are plugins which help you build a separate version of your site for mobile devices:

Apart from plugins, you will also find a few themes which are mobile-specific, and can be deployed alongside your normal theme:

Have you used WP Touch and what are your thoughts about? Let us know in the comments section below!

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