Chapter 1. Using Plugins to Make Your Site Mobile-friendly

Imagine you're the designer or administrator of an existing website and your client or manager tells you the site needs to be mobile-friendly, in a hurry. There's a limited budget and no time, so what do you do?

The answer, as with many WordPress challenges, could be a plugin.

When I first set up a mobile website for a client in 2010, there were only about half a dozen plugins that would help achieve this. Now, if you search for the term mobile in the WordPress plugin repository at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, you will get 466 results, about 10 percent of which are plugins which will help make an existing desktop site mobile-friendly. They do it in different ways, but in this chapter, we will look at some that make your site mobile-friendly in the quickest possible time.

Note

WordPress uses plugins to add extra functionality to a site, which isn't a part of the core WordPress installation. Plugins exist for a huge array of tasks, from backing up your site to adding full e-commerce functionality. To find out more about plugins, see http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins.

In this chapter we shall:

• Learn about the different types of mobile plugins and how they work

• Identify what you need to consider before choosing a plugin to make your site mobile-friendly

• Examine some of the available plugins, see how they make a site look, and identify some of their pros and cons

• Learn how to install and configure some of the most effective mobile plugins

So let's get on with it!