Responsive Design: 9 Tips to Improve WordPress Site

Responsive Design are one of the most crucial factors that enable companies to offer fantastic user experience to their customers. Now, you must be thinking, how?

No need to worry, though. I will describe each and every aspect of creating a fantastic WordPress responsive site.

Today, WordPress powers 25 percent of the web. Thus, no wonder why developers are now paying attention to developing and testing WordPress sites to make them fully responsive.

Let’s check out the reasons why responsive web designs are crucial but before coming to the point, first understand:

What is Responsive Web Design?

Designers and developers across the world follow technique to create enthralling websites that can run on a variety of users’ screens without losing their look and feel. A site designed by adopting responsive technique allows users to browse the same website on different devices.

Why Responsive Web Designs?

Today, responsive designs are dominating the market because they:

* Boost Search Engine Visibility
* Provides Excellent User Experience
* Skyrocket Conversion Rates & Boost Sales
* Provide Simple Site Management
* Offer Fantastic Offline Browsing Experience

Now, let’s check out below mentioned tips:

1. Give Soul to Your Website with CSS & HTML

CSS & HTML elements provide soul to your site. Without them, you can’t even imagine creating a responsive design for your WordPress website.

CSS are the base that offers developers to build responsive layouts. The CSS codes are written for the HTML elements that you want to give effect as per your proposed design.

The combination of CSS3 and HTML5 can let any developer create an incredible WordPress website. So, you can say that there is an enormous scope for designers and developers when it comes to showing creativity and innovation with website designs.

2. Use the Power of PHP
WordPress platform support PHP language, so use PHP.
For instance, if you want to align your brand’s logo and website’s navigation, then you can try this code to your functions.php file:

@meida only screen and (min-width: 768px)
{
#header {
float: left !important;
max-width: 20%;
position: absolute !important; }
#navigation{
max-width: 70%;
float: right !important;
top: 2.5em;
margin-bottom:53m !important; }

3. Create Grids for Responsive Design

Bootstrap provides grid system for creating responsive layouts. Similarly, you have to be more cautious while building a responsive design for your WordPress website.

Grids have to play a critical role in a responsive website design. If you want to make your site to adapt any screen size, then you have to create codes accordingly. Grids allow easy resizing so that all the essential elements of your website look fit over different devices.

4. Optimize Images for Responsive Design

Images are the most crucial element of any responsive website. While creating a responsive design for your website, you must optimize the images. Image optimization will dramatically reduce bandwidth and scaling issues.
Concerning image format, you can use JPEG, GIF, and PNG-8. But, remember one thing, avoid using PNG format at anyhow as it can impact the overall size of the website and images by at least five times.
For making your images responsive, you can add the code mentioned below to the images you want:

img {
max-width: 100%;
}

Further, you can follow this link, to get detailed information on creating responsive images.

5. Provide Life with JQuery & JavaScript

Use JQuery and JavaScript to make your pages livelier. With the aid of these two, you can add effects like slide up/down, fade in/out, hide/show, and several other animation effects to your pages. JQuery and JavaScript both empower WordPress developers to enhance the overall user experience of the developing websites.

6. Use Options Provided By WordPress

WordPress offers you two ways to make your site responsive. Let’s check out the ways:

* You know there are a plethora of WordPress plugins are available that allows quick integration and reduce your workload of making your WordPress website responsive. Use those WordPress plugins to make your website mobile-friendly, and save your valuable time and efforts. Further, you can check out this fantastic resource at HONGKIAT that describes top plugins to make your site responsive.

* To make your website responsive, you can rely on a theme switcher. Irrespective of the kind of smartphone, OS, or even browser, this theme switcher allows you to select different mobile themes for each mobile browser. But, from the consistency aspect, it doesn’t look a viable option.

7. Mobile-Friendly WordPress Themes: The Ultimate Choice

No doubt, responsive website design has become the essence of modern day businesses. There are several mobile-friendly WordPress themes are available that you can use to make your website responsive.
If you are thinking about the benefits of using WordPress responsive themes, then check this out:

* Most of the themes are free. So, there is no need to pay anything.

* These themes have powerful features that offer easy site management and customization. Further, you will have ample choices of themes that will vary in features, choose the relevant one that best fits your needs.

8. Use Online Tools to Check Responsiveness

For checking the responsiveness of your website, you can rely on several free online tools. These online tools enable you to test the mobile-friendliness of your WordPress website. Just take a glance at the list of online emulators that you can employ for testing the responsiveness of your website.

* Am I Responsive
* Mobile-Friendly Test
* MobileTest.me
* Responsinator

These tools allow you to test your website in a trouble-free manner. Further, they save your valuable time, money and energy.

9. Points to Remember

Whenever you plan to transform your WordPress site into a responsive one, keep these points in your mind, always:

* Never use absolute positioning until you find it necessary.
* Avoid using excessive text on mobile devices as it may affect the layout of your website.
* Structure your site correctly; otherwise, ‘div’ issues can make it quite complicated for you.
* Use JavaScript/JQuery but in a limit.

Summing Up

This blog unzips tricks on making a WordPress website responsive. I hope the points raised above may prove beneficial to you. Don’t forget to comment; your feedback will be highly appreciated.