Hello fellow bloggers!

Optimizing your site’s PC, tablet, and mobile design ensures your readers have the best user experience navigating your blog, resulting in less “bounce” rates and more page views per user. (yay!) “Get Read All Over” prompts bloggers to learn more about responsive design and mobile-friendly theme capabilities. So what’s the difference you ask?

Here are key differences of Responsive vs. Mobile-Friendly designs.

Responsive Design

• Content (text, images, layout) dynamically change with screen size
• Navigation/ Menus are condensed
• Images are optimized for the screen size
• Borders, Padding, and Spacing maintain their ratio

Mobile-Friendly Design

• Designed to maintain look & feel across all devices (no concern for usability or functionality)
• Content is static
• Images automatically become smaller/ thumbnails
• Navigation/ Menus are simplified

There are reasons bloggers will opt for a simple mobile-friendly design, but if you consider how many of your viewers access your site via mobile, I highly suggest a theme with built-in responsive design. As per, @kristaevans:

If you’re not sure if your theme is responsive, check its description page; you can also search specifically for responsive themes.

You can use the Customizer to “test” your site on different devices — this allows you to see how responsive design works, and you can also play with options to find the perfect mix that makes you happy on the big screen and the small.

If you preview your sites and they’re not up to your liking, a really quick fix is to enable your mobile theme capabilities. Simply go to your WP Admin > Appearance > Mobile > and click “enable”. You can further modify your options based on your preference (I personally clicked YES to everything except “Turn off the Custom Header text color?”, as to stay on brand. Revisit “Blogging201: Audit Your Brand + Video” to learn why that’s important.

Hope that insight motivates you to definitely prioritize enabling mobile capabilities of your site!

Here’s how the “Read All Over” challenge optimized McCallisterSculpture.com.

On my mobile device, my “sticky” feed only displayed 1 of 3 featured images. That blank space under “Consumption Art” was an eyesore, and did not make the impactful first impression I wanted my readers to attain. So I revisited the “sticky” blog posts and looked for the variables. The surprising difference was “Post Format”! These posts were previously “Gallery” style, so it was easy as changing it to “Standard” to enable mobile visibility. If you’re having the same problem, I hope this helped! This made a huge difference, as you can see in the mobile screenshots below.

BEFORE

AFTER