CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wordpress
falc0nit3
falc0nit3

Reputation: 1009

Mobile Version of a Wordpress Site

I'm trying to create a mobile version of an already existing website. I've tried to read the previous questions on SO but they don't entirely give me all the answers I'm looking for.

The options I have to make my site more mobile friendly are:

1) Convert my current website to be more responsive using CSS Media Queries: I don't think this approach is suitable in my case, as the UI is fairly complicated and there is more information that I can properly show on a mobile. I will need to make sure I don't show some information that is not as relavent on the mobile.

2) Use php detection and serve up different versions of the same page by using different templates: This way I can show only what is most useful on the mobile version and load up additional css which specific to mobile. A lot of websites including StackOverflow/Imdb seem to be going this route. If i go this route, Is it necessary to have a subdomain such as m.mywebsite.com and serve a mobile version on that? Or can i just serve the current page with the same domain and url structure to mobile, only different html/css to better suit mobile. I would prefer to not have the subdomain(StackOverlow seems to be doing this). Also will this be confusing to users and something to avoid as a best practice? Most importantly, how will this affect the SEO for the site? Since some content is missing on the mobile, but present on the desktop, with the same url structure - will it trigger a red flag in search engines and penalize?

Thank you!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 93

Answers (1)

manishie
manishie

Reputation: 5322

Regarding option 2:

There's no need to do the m.domain.com subdomain thing anymore. It makes life much more confusing.

I use the mobiledetect php library (there's a wordpress plugin for it too) to determine the client.

Then use conditionals in your php to provide different content for each.

Regarding indexing, the crawlers will not be flagged by mobiledetect as mobile browsers, so they will index your desktop version of the site. You want this, as the desktop version will no doubt have more content and provide increased page rank. The crawlers will never know that mobile-only content exists so there won't be any penalty.

Upvotes: 1

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