3 Easiest Ways to Make Your WooCommerce Site Mobile-Friendly
If you own a WooCommerce site in 2022 and that site is not mobile-friendly, it is bad news. This is a blatant truth.
The competition in the industry is too high in today’s date and when your business or store is not mobile-ready, you automatically lose half of your customers, or even more.
However, it might not be easy all the time to ensure that your website is working seamlessly on all kinds of devices. And if you are a newbie in the WooCommerce world, it might get a little bit trickier for you than the rest.
That’s why we have come here with this article. We will walk you through the 3 easiest ways to make your WooCommerce site mobile-friendly.
So, without further ado, let’s get into the article!
Why Do You Need to Make WooCommerce Site Mobile-Friendly?
If you want to run a business successfully, you do not have any other option other than being available for your customers all the time. It is even truer for an online business.
People are online all the time now, so it gets very easy for a business owner to grab the attention of people and connect with them on these online platforms. But they are not available on these platforms through their laptops or PCs. Well, not usually.
The surge of the internet is seen tremendously after smartphones have become so available for people. So you can very well understand how important it is for you to make your website mobile-friendly.
Still, let us identify some of the most certain advantages you will get by making your website mobile-ready.
- Reaching the highest number of people: As we have already mentioned, when your site is mobile-friendly, you automatically expose your business to a greater number of people.
You must have millions of targets customers and it is safe to say that every one of them has a smartphone. So, your reach gets to the peak when your business can be easily visited from mobile phones.
- Offering easiest access to the stakeholders: A mobile-friendly store can be accessed by anyone from anywhere. This kind of ease and comfort makes the overall experience of a shopper better and smoother. And this ultimately leads to customer retention and more conversion.
- Meeting customers’ expectations: Having a website that can be effortlessly navigated on a mobile phone helps you meet the expectations of your customers for a better shopping experience. A sense of faith is created inside their mind about your store as to accessibility and comfort and this can definitely help your business to grow.
3 Easiest Ways to Make Your WooCommerce Site Mobile-Friendly
Some easy and useful steps can help you make your WooCommerce site harmoniously navigable from all mobile devices. We have identified the three easiest ones for you in this article.
#1 Using Responsive Themes
Usually, when you open up a WooCommerce store, you choose a specific theme. This helps in ornamenting your store and at the same time, allows your customers to have a better and more aesthetically pleasing shopping experience.
Now, not all the themes which are available on WordPress are not suitable for mobile. Yes, if you are a new user and have chosen a theme rather recently, there is a big possibility that your theme is an updated one and mobile responsive. But that not might be the case for older themes.
After optimizing the theme like this, the next thing which you have to do is check if the version of the theme matches the version of your WordPress. If it does not, it might create some problems, which is why you need to fix that.
Check, double-check, even triple-check after you have installed the theme to see if it is working smoothly on mobile devices. You need to see if all the images can be seen properly and the texts fit the screen.
Although it is very unlikely that you will not find a proper theme for your website on WordPress, do not get worried even if you cannot find the most suitable one. You can always make a personalized theme for your website just by following a few easy steps.
Examples of Mobile-Ready WooCommerce Themes
To get you started, we have identified some of the best WooCommerce themes which can give you a mobile-ready website with an inviting look-
Astra
This is a very popular theme available on WordPress built for WooCommerce websites. There are hundreds of features that this theme can offer you to make your website look good on any device.
The best part? Applying this theme will not load decrease your speed, at all! The gallery option of Astra is extraordinary as well. Your customers can get a peek at your products from their mobile phones without any sort of discomfort.
WooShop
This theme has been specially crafted for the WooCommerce stores. So you can easily understand how efficient this theme might be for you to make your WooCommerce site mobile-friendly.
The theme WooShop is super responsive and it comes with a plethora of options for your product and shop homepage. This theme gives you the leverage of customization, so if you do not like the theme as it is, you can also change it as per your preferences.
Avada
Avada is hands down one of the most popular themes of WordPress and that surely is for a reason. Besides being responsive and compatible with any and every screen size, this theme also comes with the option of previews.
You can take a look at the previews to understand how your page is going to look on different kinds of screen sizes and different devices. The super-easy configuration of Avada is comfy to be used by all, beginners or experts.
H-Code
If you want to go a little deeper into the sea and go for a theme that comes with tons of customization features, then H-Code is the one for you.
There are so many cool and unique customization options for website owners in this theme but with no need for any advanced coding skills at all. Extremely easy for beginners to use, this particular theme can help you in tailoring the most tasteful yet efficient theme.
#2 Taking Help of WordPress Plugins
We all know there is a WordPress plugin for pretty much any problem we might face in making our website an effective and ideal one. These plugins can also save your neck when it comes to making your site mobile-friendly.
The major reason why we use any plugin is to add any specific functionality to our websites. Now, there are a lot of WordPress plugins that have been designed solely to make WooCommerce site mobile-friendly, and then there are some which come with this perk besides another major one.
Like always, you have to understand the nature and functions of any plugin that you intend to use before you install it, besides reading all the terms and conditions.
We have identified some of the best WordPress plugins which can help to make your website mobile-friendly.
Let’s take a look at those!
Some of the Best WordPress Plugins to Create Mobile-Friendly Website
Hummingbird
This WordPress plugin can increase the speed of your website by a great deal.
The major trick which is used by this plugin is that they help in creating a copy of the interaction the viewer had with your website on their phone as a cache. In this way, if and when the viewer will visit your site again, the page will take much less time to load as the information has already been saved.
Another benefit that you will get by using this plugin is that it will find out various problems within your site regarding the speed and will suggest solutions to tackle those problems. Now, if that’s not amazing, I don’t know what is!
Hummingbird has become a go-to for many of the newcomers in WordPress for its reliability and easy functionality along with the hundreds of suggestions that this plugin offer to beginners.
JetPack
Another very useful WordPress plugin that can make your WooCommerce site mobile-ready is JetPack. The popularity of JetPack is increasing day by day for all the excellent features that it offers to its users.
This WordPress plugin has been exclusively designed to increase the speed as well as the performance of your website. So, you can easily understand why we have put it in our recommendations.
One of the features of this plugin is that it helps in loading the images faster and we all know how important it is to grab the attention of the viewers of the website as we get literally seconds to make an impression on them.
WPTouch
This is a WordPress plugin that is basically recommended by everyone, including Google!
WPTouch comes with the functionality of making your website fit any screen of any device. And most importantly, the plugin does not require any alteration of your themes, design, or images for that. So, tailoring a mobile-friendly eCommerce website becomes super easy with it!
It is a very lightweight plugin which is why the other functions of your website will not be hampered and the speed of the website will remain as fast as ever. WPTouch has proved to enhance the user experience of mobile users by a great deal.
That makes this plugin the first choice for many who want to make WooCommerce site mobile-friendly.
CTX Feed
WooCommerce product feed generator CTX Feed allows you to create the most organized and optimized product feeds that can get accepted by Google Merchant Centre.
A good functioning website must have good product feeds as without an ideal product feed you cannot get into various marketing channels in the first place. The product feeds are needed to be such which helps in creating an ideal display of your website on all kinds of devices, including mobile phones.
This error-free WooCommerce product feed generator allows you to have an ideal blend of a mobile-friendly website and optimized product feed of the products of your businesses, which is a very fair deal I must say.
OBox Mobile
This is a very simple plugin with some very simple motives. The primary one among those is to ensure mobile functionality for all kinds of devices.
If you want to make your WooCommerce site mobile-friendly, the first thing which you will need to ensure is that your viewers can access your website from all kinds of devices and that they can have an uninterrupted and smooth experience when they are looking at it.
Well, OBox Mobile can very well give you that along with offering a plethora of color schemes, themes, sliders, buttons, and designs.
#3 Choosing Optimized Pictures
Pictures can say a thousand words and this is truer for online businesses or websites. The only closest physical proof that the customers have of the products of your website are the pictures and that is why it is extremely important that you choose the best and most optimized pictures for your website.
Pictures and images do not only add beauty to your websites, rather these are something that the buyers look into very attentively and carefully when they want to make a buying decision. And the business usually requires uploading a mass of images at the same time, which even adds to the hassle.
Now, it is not a surprise to us about the struggle that website owners have to face to grab the attention of any potential buyer. It is not possible to catch the eye of any potential buyer if the page or the images takes too much time to load. They will just close the tab and move to another website.
We don’t want that, do we?
There are some simple but useful steps which you can take in order to stop that from happening. Have a look-
Compressing the pictures
This is the first thing that you will need to do. This basically means to decrease the original size of all your images. Compressing the pictures make them easy to load on mobile phones.
But, they do not hamper the original quality of the images anyhow. When the images are of smaller size, it will automatically increase the speed of your page loading and this can help you in retaining the attention of the viewers.
Choosing the right format
Another good trick to optimize your product images is choosing the most appropriate format for those. It is a common urge of people to choose all the images in a JPG format. But that might not be ideal all the time.
What you can do is opt for a WebP format. This is rather a new format but has definitely proved to be of much worth for the website owners. The storage can be saved by almost 25% with the help of this format.
The WebP format supports effortlessly on WordPress as well, so it can prove to be especially useful for your WooCommerce site.
Considering lazy loading
Although it is extremely important to display the product images for the viewers, sometimes you need to take the decision of concealing those as well.
Are you wondering why?
Well, the simple answer is, to increase the site’s loading speed. You can opt for the lazy loading technique for some of your products which you might think not to be extremely necessary to have pictures.
Now mind you, lazy loading does not mean that you will not insert pictures, rather it gives the viewers the option to load the images as per their will.
How Can You Inspect If Your Site is Mobile-Friendly?
Now, even after you take all the necessary steps to make your site mobile-friendly, you need to check and inspect if the site is working fine. If anything, this will make you more sure and confident regarding the effectiveness of your website.
There are some really easy steps which you can take to do that-
Checking form your phones
This is the easiest way. You can always check your website from your mobile phone now and then and check if that is working fine. If it is working fine on yours, you can be certain your site is working perfectly on every other mobile device too.
Taking the mobile-friendly test of Google
But if you want to be more sure, you can always go for the mobile-friendly test of Google. This test literally takes seconds and anyone can do it.
The only thing you need to do is go to Google mobile-friendly test and copy-paste your website’s URL on the Test URL section. Google will then notify you if your website is mobile-friendly or not within seconds.
Inspecting the browser
This is another easy way to check the responsiveness of your website. You can go to the browser and shrink it from left to right. You can consider your website to be mobile-friendly if the page does not get cut off from any side.
Ending Note
Hopefully, by now you have understood the importance of making your WooCommerce site mobile-friendly. Any business of this modern world should have a website and all those websites must be mobile-friendly. There is simply no alternative to that.
So, you need to take every single step, small or big, to ensure that your website runs smoothly and efficiently on any device. This will increase traffic on your site immensely allowing you to create a loyal and responsive customer base.
Mamunur Rahsid is a Digital Marketing Specialist at WebAppick. With 8+ years of experience in the DM sector, he loves talking about SEO, SEM, Content Marketing, Video Marketing, Media Buying and WooCommerce.
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