People nowadays use their mobile phone a lot to surf websites. According to statistic, within 2017, more than 69% of the population will use mobile phone and more than 39% among theme will use Smartphone. Now, who would like to miss impressing this big amount of people?
Impressing people when they are visiting your website, it is easy in case of PC users. Your fixed width website will look fine on PC browsers since most of the display devices of PC are 768 pixel in width. Most of the mobile devices have less than 500 pixel width display. A fixed width website will not look good at all in mobile device.
To impress Cell phone users, you need to make a responsive website and it is easy to make one using WordPress. You will find a lot of responsive themes by a single search but which one should you choose? Are they all same? No, they are not all the same. Some responsive themes are enriched with JavaScript, CSS and some only have CSS coding with some HTML. Tips to choose the best responsive theme are bellow.
Checking in different resolutions
A WordPress responsive theme must be designed for multiple resolutions. If a theme has CSS design only for two types of resolution, one global design for PC and one global design for mobile devices under 500 Pixel, then the responsiveness of that theme will not satisfy you.
Many people use different types of Smartphone which have different functionalities, different OS and different device width. Assume that someone is enjoying visiting your website at 600 Pixel width using an Android tab.
Installed theme on your website only has one global design for all mobile devices and that is best for 600 pixel width display devices. A person who has a Smartphone with 450 pixel width display, will not enjoy visiting your website at all. This is why you need to choose a theme which offers multiple designs for multiple display.
Optimized for posting ad
Posting ad is little trickier than posting regular contents on website. Sometimes. you will need JavaScript to post ad on your website.
If you have a plan of posting ads on your website, you need to find out the theme that can optimize JavaScript for mobile devices and perfectly show your ads on mobile devices without making website problematic.
Banner needs to be resized automatically according to the width of the display device. We can use JavaScript code to resize any images to show perfectly in a mobile device. Developers also use Media-Queries to show different images in different display devices. So if you are using flat images, it can be easily optimized using media-queries.
HTML 5 or Flash?
There are two ways of playing video in modern browsers. Videos can be played using Flash or HTML 5 coding. HTML 5 is more preferable than Flash because in some OS, Flash is not acceptable. Flash also consumes more CPU energy and RAM than HTML 5. HTML 5 consumes less CPU and RAM but plays video in better way than flash.
Some responsive themes can play HTML 5 video and some only let Flash handle the vide. You should choose one theme that can play HTML 5 video and flash both in case if any browser cannot play HTML 5 video.
Handling menus
Handling menus is the most important part of responsiveness. Menus should be shown differently in mobile devices.
Most of the times, developers use touch button for menu section. It is better than using dropdown menu for mobile devices because it will be super hard to access drop down menus using the mobile phone.
Dropdown menus take more width which is not good for mobile devices. In average, a website has more than 5 items in menu. It is not possible to show all 5 items in a short width such as 480 pixel.
If menus are not optimized for mobile devices, it will look odd and the items will not fit and will not be easy to understand.
SEO friendly
We know that Google shows different results for mobile devices. It is now important to make a website SEO friendly for both mobile devices and computers. How can responsive design affect SEO of your website? As it is said earlier, more than 69% people are about to own Smartphone, so we need to care about how well our website is optimized for small devices.
By using media-queries, developers hide some contents and in some cases, they hide many contents. They hide it for mobile devices only. If a part of the website which is important for SEO is not visible in mobile, then the website is not perfectly optimized for SEO. Look for the items which is missing and if those are important for search engine optimization.
Speed of your website
A theme also affects your website’ s page loading speed. If the speed of your website is not good enough because of a responsive theme, you should obviously stop using that theme. With high quality hosting service and by optimizing codes, people are trying to make their website load faster.
A bad theme can also freeze internet browsers of website visitors. This happens mostly when a theme is built using inappropriate codes.
Your website’s page loading speed should not be more than 1.5 seconds and it includes connecting time to your website. The best way of obtaining this is by loading the JavaScript after the HTML resources have been loaded. When the page loads HTML and CSS first, it loads the textual contents and all the designs, and then the website loads images, videos and JavaScript. That way, the website loads faster in browser.
Cross-browser design
Responsiveness is not only about optimizing a website for different device width but it is also about optimizing a website for different browsers.
Different browsers handle codes and contents in different way. If a browser cannot load Flash video, then load HTML 5 video in that. If a browser can’t load JavaScript, then show a page with HTML and CSS.
Cross-browser design is mandatory to make a website fully responsive. When you are buying a WordPress responsive theme, you must check if the theme is optimized for different browsers.
Internal architecture of your website
Google panda update has made a lot of website owners aware about website’s architecture. If the architecture of a website is not good, Google will not show that website in early pages of search result.
There are mainly three sections of a single HTML page. It starts with header and then body and then the footer. All the contents stay in body and in footer and header, we keep navigation bar, footer items and other items. The internal structure of a WordPress website is more complex than a single HTML page.
There are a lot of items and a lot of inline codes. Structure of all codes and contents should be perfect for SEO. Developer needs to know which things must come first and then which thing must go at the end of the page.
Social media share buttons
It is important to have a social media share button in your content pages specially where you are keeping articles about your company or the products that you are selling. By sharing through social networking sites, your website will receive more visitors and it will perform better in search engine result pages.
Social media buttons also need to be responsive. A droop down button is  perfect for showing on big display but for mobile devices, there should be touch to share like button.
Fonts
Check the default font for large display and default font for small display. Both should not be same. Some fonts look great in small size and some fonts look odd in small size.
If a theme can show contents in different fonts in different display width, that will be the perfect theme to use. Fonts can be colored differently too for different display size. Assume that you want to show header of the content blue in large display and orange in small display. A developer can accomplish that by using media-queries.
WordPress Plugins
Many of us use plugins in our WordPress websites. A website can be more functional with additional plugins. If a theme is not optimized for using different types of plugins, that theme is not perfect to use on your website. We need plugin for showing images in slide show, we need plugin to show ads, we need plugin for SEO purposes, and there are a lot of other reasons to use plugins in our website.
A good responsive theme will have the ability of handling different types of plugin perfectly. A Plugin contains basically a bunch of PHP and JavaScript code. Having the latest JS library is required in a modern responsive theme. If a theme depends on the default JS library of WordPress, that is not good at all.
The end
Content resizing is not the only duty of a responsive theme. A good WordPress responsive theme must have all the abilities mentioned above and work great on all devices and all browsers.