Over the past several years, smartphones have revolutionized how we connect to the internet, and interact with others around the world. According to Pew Research Center, 34 percent of adults own a tablet, and 56 percent of adults own a smartphone. Chances are, some of your readers are consuming your content using one of the two devices.

If you have yet to make your WordPress site mobile friendly, here are a few problems:

• Longer load times. Not everyone is able to enjoy 4G speeds, and even on 3G, a typical web page can far exceed the average 7.25 second load time for web users.
• Poor user experience. Your blog may look great on a desktop or laptop, but when you shrink it down to a screen as small as 3.5-inches, it becomes a jumbled mess.
• Adding to your reader’s phone bill. Okay, maybe it’s not that bad, but a lot of smartphone users are on a capped data plan. If a blog post requires a few megabytes of information to be loaded, that’s data use you could have easily avoided.

To make your WordPress site mobile friendly, many think they have to go find a theme, do all this coding, or hire someone to do it for them. That’s completely fine, and there are many exceptional examples out there. However, you don’t have to do that, let alone spend any money. [Read more…]