You may have heard something about being “mobile responsive” with your website design. It used to be more of an option, but now that the majority of sales transactions take place with a phone or tablet, having your website be easy to see on smaller screens is a must.
Consequences of Not Considering Mobile
I’m sure you’ve seen older site designs on your smartphone that have teeny-tiny type and force you to zoom in to fill in a form or click on a button. Kind of annoying, really. You may also have a brick-and-mortar business that does most transactions in person and may think that mobile should matter less.
Well, it does matter for every business, because with a frustrating mobile display, your online visibility will be less, and visibility to search engines is important for your visibility to potential clients, local or remote.
And if you want any payback for your effort in building that website, having Google pay attention to you does make a difference. They downgrade priority to non-mobile-responsive sites now.
How to Get Mobile Responsive
Fortunately, being mobile responsive isn’t super-hard with WordPress.
For me the best option seems to be to use either a frequently updated free theme, or a reliable paid theme (I recommend StudioPress themes—and they don’t pay me to do that. :)). Most professional themes create instructions to line up your information correctly automatically for smaller screens.
Be careful with those basic website builder features offered by web hosting services, though. They often have more basic code behind their pages that isn’t naturally mobile responsive. Some parts of the pages may work OK, but things like standard HTML tables might not adjust (I’m happy to tweak these issues if you need me!).
If you have any mobile devices, it really is worth your time to check and see what your site looks like and decide if you need some tweaking or a better theme to make the mobile transition a smooth one.
If you need any help, just let me know. 🙂
I'd love to hear from you!