10 Mar Why WordPress And Mobile Content Go Hand-In-Hand

There are many viable ways to sell WordPress (which is to say, extol its advantages — being free, it can’t literally be sold). You can point to the vast and vibrant community surrounding it, the rich range of easy integrations, or the user-friendly design. You could even use a simple appeal to popularity: as the most popular CMS in the world, it’s clearly a respectable choice.

But another route you can take is to point to the exceptional suitability of WordPress for use with mobile-targeted content. With each passing year, mobile content becomes more important for anyone with online ambitions. Whether you’re trying to sell products, build your brand, or simply provide a useful service, you need to be creative mobile-optimized experiences.

But what makes WordPress in particular such a good choice as the foundation for mobile content? Well, the reasons vary — allow me to explain:

WordPress has countless mobile-polished themes

Themes and templates are of critical importance for saving time and ensuring maximum compatibility when creating digital content. If you want to be successful with content marketing, you need to achieve a fairly rapid production pace, and spending a lot of time trying to configure a suitable layout is going to make it very difficult to meet deadlines.

While it’s fairly common for a CMS to provide various themes and templates, WordPress has an assortment that leads the industry, particularly given that it’s a free platform to begin with. You can easily browse through excellent free themes, and if you find one that’s suitable, you can go ahead and apply it without spending a cent.

The options don’t stop there, of course, because there’s also a vast array of premium themes. You may be intimidated by the prospect of spending money on a theme, but look at it this way: if you choose well (here are some tips for this), you can spend a modest sum on a theme that you use to good effect for years to come. Compare that to the prospect of needing to commit hours and hours of your time to designing and updating custom layouts — it’s a bargain.

There are plenty of high-quality WordPress hosts

Hosting matters for all internet traffic, of course, because you need your content to be accessible at any time and from any location, but it’s particularly significant for mobile traffic. There are several reasons for this:

• Mobile devices often operate on mobile data networks with inconsistent quality, so a good site needs to load quickly even on a weak connection.
• People are less patient when browsing on mobile devices. If your site doesn’t load almost immediately, they’ll go elsewhere.
• Mobile search rankings already factor in loading speed to some extent. If your page is slow enough, it’ll be flagged as such in the SERPs.

With speed being so essential on mobile devices, you need to ensure that your web host can deliver great performance, and WordPress is the ideal platform for finding such a host. Using a self-hosted CMS means you can work with a host of your preference, which can be particularly useful if your target audience is confined to a specific region. The location of your operation might not matter too much these days, but the location of your host certainly does — the nearer it is to your audience, the better the performance will be.

There’s also no shortage of excellent web hosts (spread throughout the globe, many using worldwide content delivery networks) specifically catering to WordPress websites: you can find some here. The advantage of working with such a host is that their in-depth understanding of how WordPress works will equip them to give you invaluable advice about how to configure your site. They may even be able to handle your plugin updates for you.

Of course, you can simply go through WordPress.com if you want a budget-friend hosted WordPress package. The core appeal of WordPress is that you can find a situation that works for you. As Matt Mullenweg, the Founding Developer of WordPress, said on SEO expert Stephan Spencer’s Marketing Speak podcast, the goal is to “democratize publishing”.

You can easily find SEO-centric plugins

Just as the significance of speed is increased on mobile, so too is the significance of SEO. Being found in the search rankings is hard on desktop, but harder on mobile — there’s less screen real-estate to appear in, and Google more actively fills the SERPs with its own featured content, leaving less room for organic results overall.

And while a lot of SEO comes down to writing great content and promoting it well, there are various technical elements that you need to cover. Boasting a massive library of plugins, many of which are completely free to use, WordPress has everything you need to quickly and cheaply tick the essential SEO boxes.

For the definitive example, look at the Yoast SEO plugin. Long regarded as the definitive SEO plugin for the average user, it provides a lot of valuable functionality at zero cost, then offers even more for a one-time lifetime payment. It isn’t the only worthwhile plugin around, though: you can find an excellent selection of SEO plugins here.

Wrapping up, it’s easy to see why WordPress and mobile content go hand in hand. Mobile content is all about optimization, making it as easy and convenient as possible to view copy and images on a small screen, and WordPress provides a level of overall polish that even top-end hosted platforms struggle to compete with.