I was visiting Ben Spark‘s blog the other week from my blackberry 8830 and noticed his site rendered quickly, and with no images, ads or banners from my blackberry browser. I inquired to what he was using to make his site render differently on mobile devices. He told me about a Mobile Plugin for WordPress and I decided to do a little digging and find my own.
With the Mobile Plug-In For WordPress it comes as a plug-in and a theme, you install the plug-in, and you have to unbundle and install the theme as well. When you activate the plug-in (make sure you have theme unpacked to the themes folder first), your blog will now display a much lighter weight blog version to mobile devices.
I tested on my wifes Blackberry Storm and Blackberry 8830, but you can see in the settings all of the blackberry browser types that are supported by the Mobile Plug-in for WordPress.
The advantages to using the plug-in are that your site will load instantly on mobile browsers, they will only see your titles and then can go into your articles upon selecting a title. This prevents them from seeing any images, ads or banners at the benefit of having instant access to content.
From my experience for mobile phones with such tiny screens and slower load times than home broadband connections, you can’t afford to have 20-30 second page load times from someone who is on the go, they simply will leave your blog and move on to another news source before your page even finishes loading. It is better to provide immediate access to content so the user keeps coming back on a mobile device, mobile users are least likely to look at and click on sidebar ads which may not even be visible unless the user scrolls the screen on a mobile browser in some cases.
So if you are running wordpress and particularly if you have a theme with lots of widgets or embedded video, consider improving your blog experience on a mobile device and try the Mobile Plug-in for WordPress. I am now using it on dragonblogger.com so if you are reading this article from an iPhone, Blackberry or other mobile device, let me know if you like it.
-Dragon Blogger
Related posts:
- Improve Your WordPress Blog Load Times My most excellent and helpful web hosting company Dreamhost has done the extra research of finding out why my dragonblogger.com...
- Improve Your WordPress Page Load Performance Four Wordpress Plug-ins to help you improve your blog pageload performance by compressing images, CSS, HTML files and caching your...
- Blogging Tip: Stress Test Your Blog For Free Load Impact website has a free 40 user stress test that can give you some decent performance data for your...
- Dependency On Mobile Devices and Technology This is kind of a mix of technology and personal post, I mean it is about human beings becoming so...
- Tips to Clean Up Your Blog Here are some helpful tips anyone can apply to clean up their blog for best presentation....
| via FaceBook, Twitter, RSS or Email |  |
Enter your email and subscribe now!
Tags: blogging tips, iphone theme for wordpress, mobile blogging, mobile plugin for wordpress, mobile theme for wordpress, mobile wordpress, mobile wordpress blog theme, phone browser plugin for wordpress, wordpress, wordpress blackberry theme, wordpress blog theme for mobile, wordpress for mobile, wordpress for phone browsers, wordpress for phones, wordpress load on mobile, wordpress load on phones, wordpress mobile plugin, wordpress mobile theme, wordpress plugins, wordpress themes
December 16th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Hey there DB. This is great. I need to find one for Blogger. My wife reads my site on her phone (G1) and she’ll complain of how long it takes to load. If she’s complaining, I’m sure they are others out there experiencing the same thing. Hopfully, I’ll be able to get something up and quick. Many thanks! Later.
Metallman´s last blog ..Top Commentator Contest is Here to Stay
[Reply]
December 16th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
I will definitely check this out Justin. Though I am pretty sure the traffic I’m getting from mobile phone users are close to nil, we bloggers needs all the traffic we can get. Thanks for sharing.
ZXT´s last blog ..What’s Hot on Youtube!
[Reply]
December 21st, 2009 at 8:24 pm
Will install this plugin when I get my HTC HD2.
Jayce´s last blog ..How to hack Facebook account profile
[Reply]
February 16th, 2010 at 12:51 am
Well done keep up the good work I think that the smartphone will be the top selling gadget in the next few years.
[Reply]
February 16th, 2010 at 12:52 am
Nice blog it seems that the smartphone revolution is here to stay.
[Reply]