I’m pretty happy with the blog theme I’m running at the moment. I’ve taken the Thesis theme and slowly made changes to get it to the point it is at today.
Something I’m not all that happy with though is how it looks on my iPhone. It takes too long to load and I need to scroll and zoom to see all the content I’m looking for. A typical page on this site can be 800Kb to 1Mb in size, not ideal at all for mobile visitors.
So today I’ve installed the WPTouch plugin. This plugin works by simply detecting visitors using iPhones and a few other mobile handsets and displays a simplified, faster loading theme for them that also happens to be quite slick and professional looking. WPTouch is complete free to install which is great for such as useful plugin.
After activating the plugin I made just a few small tweaks to get it displaying the way I wanted it, and the results look great.
Single posts come out looking good and it even handles the resizing of images perfectly.
The only thing I’ve found wrong so far is my Aweber signup forms are sometimes not displayed properly within posts, but that is something I can work on by adjusting the settings of the form.
One final point, as a nice touch the plugin lets users opt-out of the WPTouch display and view blogs with their normal theme if they want to.
I highly recommend giving WPTouch a try on your WordPress blog.
Image Credit: Flickr
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That is really handy! I always forget about my mobile readers cause I don’t have a phone with internet connection. I wonder how many people do visit my blog from their phone…
Hi Tom, I wondered that too so I checked my analytics. Its a small percentage of my overall traffic, but its a big number in itself. Too big to ignore. If I can make just those few hundred visitors have a better experience then its definitely worth the very small amount of time it took to setup the plugin.
Hi Paul,
I read a similar article a while ago and signed up to use a different WP plug-in for mobile users. It slowed down my mobile site considerably! I think I will revisit this topic again and check out the WPTouch plug-in a try. There are a lot of people who visit my site through their mobile device, so this is a good reminder to optimize their experience as well.
Thanks for the detailed instructions. Your screen captures look great! I’ll have to get it out for myself on my smartphone.
Karen
Thanks for the post Paul. I use the WPTouch plugin on all of my blogs and hadn’t thought of the issue with the Aweber forms. I’ll definitely look into that now.
Thanks for sharing this – I’m definitely going to have to check out this plug-in. Mobile usage is increasing daily and I want to make those most of that traffic source.
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