If you’ve ever browsed to a website on your smartphone, you were probably horrified by what you saw and thought you’d never browse a website on your phone again.

You can certainly zoom in and out, if your phone provides that feature, when you want to check a movie time or a phone number for a restaurant, but to present your WordPress blog or website to visitors as is, on a smartphone, just doesn’t fit the bill.

Mobile WordPress Themes

When making your WordPress site mobile-ready, there are a few alternatives out there, however, I decided to use a plugin called WPtouch on some of my sites and WPtouch Pro on this site, billbolmeier.com.

You can download the free version at the WordPress Plugin Directory and give it a whirl.  The free version is packed with plenty of settings you experiment with on your site.

Displaying a clean iPhone looking theme by default, WPtouch lists your blog posts in a readable font size without zooming in.  For blog posts, each post is listed by default with title, auther, post date, category and tags.

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You can tweak these settings to configure how your posts list displays.  Each individual post and page has a font size by default that is readable without zooming.  Again, your results may vary depending on what phone is being used to display your site.

WPtouch and WPtouch Pro

So what’s the difference between the free version and paid version?  While the free version has quite a few settings the paid version has over 200 more settings and features, including support for tablets like the iPad.

Other settings you’ll be able to take advantage of are advertising settings that allow you to control how you want Adsense and other ad networks to display, and whether you want ads to display or not.

You can select a customizable WPtouch theme that allows you to tweak the theme to your liking.  You can set how your website’s menu structure displays and the icons that are used throughout the theme.

You can provide styling settings and enter style elements on the theme’s design configuration page.

Don’t worry about losing your tracking statistics for your site when mobile visitors show up, WPtouch is a separate theme from your desktop, which means you can provide your stats tracking code and keep track of all your site’s visitors.

Both versions allow a visitor to switch between your normal desktop looking theme and the mobile rendered theme by clicking link buttons at the bottom of your site when visited by a mobile or tablet device.  Very handy for your visitors.

Those are just a few of the highlights.

What’s are the problems with WPtouch Pro?  The only thing I experienced was multiple tries to activate the product via their own activation screens in WordPress.  They must have recurring issues with this since they’ve written warning messages about trying again if your activation doesn’t work right the first time.

I just waited for a while between each try and eventually my Pro version was activated.  All said and done, my billbolmeier.com site was mobile-ready with WPtouch Pro in about 30 minutes.  Even though my site was mobile-ready to a certain degree prior to WPtouch, it’s much better and easier to read with WPtouch Pro (affiliate link).