Optimize Your WordPress Blog For Mobile Devices

Today almost everyone has some sort of mobile device, whether it be a cell phone, PDA or a hand held gaming system like the PSP (Playstation Portable) that is capable of browsing the web. And more and more people are actually using these devices to email and view their favorite sites and blogs.

If I asked you right now if your blog was mobile ready, without checking, would you know the answer? Would you even know where to where or how to begin checking such a thing? If you answered no to any of those questions, you maybe loosing readers and not even knowing it.

Setup Your Blog For Mobile Devices

The easiest way to make your blog easily accessable by mobile devices is to install the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin by Alex King.

WordPress Mobile Edition is a plugin that shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device. Mobile browsers are automatically detected, there is no configuration needed.

The installation of this plugin is easy, just upload the “wp-mobile.php” file to your plugins directory, upload the “wp-mobile” directory to your themes directory and activate the plugin via the WordPress admin. That’s it! The plugin will automatically detect most mobile browsers and display a mobile friendly version of your blog.

Monetize Your Mobile Site

Now that we have our blog capable of displaying mobile friendly content, it’s time to think about how we can monetize our new mobile version. There are several methods that one can use to monetize their mobile content, but the one that will likely be a crowd favorite is Google’s new Adsense for Mobile.

Creating mobile Adsense ads for your mobile content is largely the same as regular Adsense ads, including the ability to specify ad size, style, and more. However, there are a few notable differences:

1. Google AdSense program policies allow you to place only one ad unit on any mobile webpage. Ad units contain either one or two text ads.

2. AdSense for Mobile requires server-side scripting, unlike the client-side scripting in JavaScript, which is not supported by most mobile browsers or webpages.

Test Your New Mobile Site

Last and most important, is to check the mobile version of your site for any errors or display issues. You can check the mobile version of your site by either using your own mobile device or by using an online simulator like the Opera Mini Simulator.

Is your site mobile ready?