Is your blog ready for latest Smartphones? WPTouch Pro is one of the plugins which can optimized your blog for mobile devices.
With the evolution of smartphones and increase in mobile web browsing, it is becoming a really important that your blog is working for mobile browsers. Most of the smartphone screens are ranging from 3inch to 5inch, with the addition of tablets it has reached to 10 inch now. Even Google has already started optimizing feeds for mobile users.
Here are some of the stats for Mobile platforms:
- Android – around 700k devices are getting activated daily.
- iOS – More than 100 million units are already sold and still growing.
- By 2014 smartphone usage should overtake desktop usage.
Reading content on these screens is different than reading it on big screens of desktops. I am using smartphone and I ignore those site which is not optimized for mobile.
Mobile users does not like to change screen from right to left for reading, they only like to move it down to bring more content. If your blog is not optimized for mobile screens then users have to move screen to right/left and up/down to read the content. This can turn off your mobile users.
WPTouch Pro is an easy way to optimize your blog for mobile screens. It does it for all mobile platforms so you don’t need to buy different plugins for each platform. If you want the plugin you can get it from here (it is an affiliate link).
What you can do with WPTouch Pro
Auto Detect Screen Size – WPTouch Pro can auto detect the screen size, so it doesn’t matter is a user have 3 inch or 10 inch screen. It will automatically format the blog content and images according to the size of the screen.
Custom Themes – WPTouch Pro also has a support for custom themes. There are two themes included with the pro version. You can create your own theme also. A good thing is that you can copy your existing theme to a child theme with a click and change the design of your mobile blog.
To change the theme you don’t need the CSS or HTML knowledge as admin panel has extensive options, so you can do the modifications like changing the colors or changing the dark or light background etc from the admin panel.
The basic idea is to create child theme and do your customization so you will not loose them even after the upgrades.
Ads support – WPTouch Pro provides full support for ad placement. You can decide where you want the ads, there are certain places where you can place the ads. If you are not sure than check the detail guide on how to add ads in WPTouch.
Site Logo – WPTouch Pro allows you to add a custom site header from the admin panel. By default it gives a text logo but if you want a image logo you can enable it from the panel.
Menu Customization – It allows full customization for the top menu, you can choose what you want to show and want you don’t want to show in the menu. you can also include up to 3 custom links and two additional link menu.
Icon Customization – The admin panel allows to change the icon set, it already has few different icon set and also allows you to add custom icon set. You can choose and change icons from the panel itself.
Tablet Theme – It comes with tablet theme, which will be shown on big screens. It has its own settings and you can decide upon the splash screen, icon set, menu and other things for tablets. It has some ipad specific settings also, which will be used on iOS.
Check the iPad theme review for WPTouch Pro Plugin:
[youtube src=”QpF4TRCmHyc”]
Web App Mode – This is a nice feature for iOS users. It allows iOS users to save your blog as an application to their device. This means that they can reach to your blog with a single click and to give a feeling of proper application you can define an splash screen which will be shown to them. So you can get a iOS application without spending an extra penny.
There is also a notification setting which allows you to show a bubble notification to iOS users, this will remind them that they can save your blog as web-app.
With all these functionality WPTouch Pro is a useful mobile theme for your blog, and with a one time fee you can get a lifetime support for the plugin.
It does have a free version but it does not provide this much customization and tablet themes. So I would prefer getting a paid version of WPTouch Pro for the blog.
If you are using the WPTouch Pro version than share your experience with us through comments.
Thanks so much for the review!!!
There’s plenty of reasons why choosing a solution like WPtouch Pro is better than a responsive solution (better usability for visitors, faster loading, easier to maintain), especially for WordPress sites.
It’s true that it will look similar to other sites that use the plugin if you don’t customize it. The basic customizations are just a starting point— we hope that our users go a little further and create unique experiences with the product.
A similar (but effective) experience for mobile visitors has been shown to be more preferable to a uniquely branded one that is unfamiliar. It’s important for site authors to respect and design for users— it’s what we’ve done with WPtouch Pro and our customer/visitor surveys we’ve conducted say just that.
Hey Sanjeev. Thanks for the review. Have you tried any of the WPTouch competitors? I’m looking for the best mobile plugin out there and was wondering how WPTouch compares to its competitors.
I have tried few and always ends up with WPtouch pro because of its iPad theme and ability to re-size the video in the mobile format. Users can play the video’s right from the mobile screens.
i am thinking of moving to wordpress and this plugin will surely help me enhance the experience of mobile visitors to my blog.
It will surely increase the conversion rate for your mobile visitor and don’t forget, Google understand that you have a mobile site and increases your mobile SERP rankings…
The most common trend that we should take into account on marketing efforts is the unstoppable rise of mobile phone technology. Now, instead of walking over to the laptop or desktop and waiting for a few minutes for it to boot up, people would rather use their mobile phones to surf the Internet. The same will happen soon for blogs. We should prepare our blogs for the mobile revolution wherein people will be able to look at our blogs from their mobile phones but can still be accessed from their laptop browsers. Thanks for sharing this!
thanks for sharing.Your video must have all the information. This page helps a lot.
Though, WP Touch Pro is great mobile theme for WordPress blog, but I prefer Mobile Press WordPress plugin to create Mobile Edition of my blog because of its simple and intuitive user interface and its quick to setup. 🙂
Hi Amit, There are so many mobile theme plugin available and I have also tried few of them..WPTouch Pro is an extensive plugin with so many options available and more control on the look and feel for the site.
WordPress plugins are really one of the best way to optimize your blog. It is this reason I like Word press platform the most. Now with the facility of plugins to optimize for mobile device your blog can rock.
WordPress is really an amazing platform and these plugins make it even more amazing. Mobile devices are growing like anything which makes these mobile skins really important.
Hi,Every one ,
already I have wordpress site and how to make it to the mobile wordpress site.
do we need to install mobile plugin only ? that is enough or we need to use any other designs ,style sheets for mobile version ?
Yes, You can just install WPTouch plugin, and do some basic settings from the admin screen of the plugin. no need of any design, style sheet or anything.
Let me know if you need any help in setup, If you are using any cache plugin then you need to one extra step (removing mobile agents from cache plugin) to set this up.
I was using a free version for some days. but I found that my Samsung galaxy y not showing the mobile version. So I have deactivated now. I am looking for any alternative for the same. Do you have any recommendation Sanjeev?
If your smartphone is not showing mobile version then your plugin was not setup correctly. You might be using some cache plugin in your blog. You need to enter the mobile user agents in your cache plugin setup and clear the cache to make it work correctly. I am using WP Super Cache and it works great with that.
Let me know which cache plugin you use, I can direct you to specific instruction for that.
I will try as per your instruction and reply if it works. Thanks for instant reply.
Hello,
i am currently using the free version of this wp-touch. its a handy plugin if you are getting visitors from smartphones also because it provides a lots of benefits and the look is also quite impressive.
Free version is also good and can be a good starter. It does make smartphone transition easy.
Nice plug-in. Smart phones are now really in demand. The auto detect screen size is a very good feature. I accessed my blog through my smart phone and it doesn’t fit the screen I have to scroll the side bars to see the other texts. I would try the free trial first.
I also tried free version before purchasing the full version. It is nice and auto detect screen size is really good as it makes your blog compatible from smartphone to tablets. Pro version has a separate theme for ipad and some additional features for them.
I believe that everybody need to implement mobile marketing and install theme than supports major mobile devices. I am sure that every blogger have seen that receive good amount of traffic from mobile devices.
And with googlebot-mobile introduction it is more important, as Google will know that your blog is optimized for mobile or not. If it is not optimized then it might rank lower in the results.
This plugin is an extremely important one! I totally agree with you on the fact that there are many readers out there who browse from their smartphones. If we do not create an easy way for them to read and have a good interaction with our blog, we might lose them!
Thanks for the information Sanjeev! Installed the plugin right away for my blog!
I am using it from the start of the Makewebworld and loving this plugin. Its really great and it can be fully customized theme for the mobile blog. With the intro of Googlebot-Mobile it become more important.
This is just what I was looking for! I use wordpress for my own site but couldn’t get it right for mobile but thanks to this I can. Thanks !
Thanks Demi, I am using this on Makewebworld and love this plugin.
This really looks like a good solution for me because I want a mobile site but it is hard to optimize your site for mobile. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Peter, Yes its hard to optimize sites for mobiles and with changing screen sizes it is more difficult. WPTouch Pro makes it really easy as it does all the customization on the run time based on the user screen. It even adjust the images also for small screens.
I love it! I’ll test the free version first, and then the pro version. Actually, I’ll check the analytics stats to see what kind of mobile devices my reader use and how many are they, maybe it doesn’t worth the effort.
Free version does not have same customization option as paid one, but it gives an good idea. You can also try to open your blog from smartphone and see how it looks there and yes checking traffic is a must. Though its web-app mode can result in returning traffic as people can add it as an application on their phone.
Thank you very much for your advice, Sanjeev! I’ll open my blog from a smartphone.
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