Before smartphones came along, mobile websites were all the rage: they allowed users to access sites on a mobile device in a quicker, more efficient manner. The font and the layout were all designed to fit onto a small screen. The page loaded quickly because there wasn’t all the extra stuff you get on a regular site.

Now that’s all changed because smartphones are essentially computers you carry around in your pocket.

But there is still a case to be made for having a mobile site.

Deadspin has one, the NYTimes has one, and even The Writer’s Coin (ahem!) has one.

The idea is to serve up your content in the most convenient way possible, depending on how users are trying to access your site.

Do You Really Need a Mobile Site?

I say yes: pretty soon everyone will have phones that are just as powerful as their home computers, so the easier you make it for them to access your site, the better.

But if you need proof, go to your analytics report. How many iPhone/Android users are coming to the site?

You can get to this report from the Visitors->Mobile->Mobile Devices menu.

What we’re looking at here is (over the past 30 days):

• How many overall visits come from mobile devices?
• What percent of overall traffic comes from mobile devices? In this case, it’s 2.25%
• Which devices are accessing the site?

This is a great example because 2.25% isn’t a lot, but it’s not insignificant. What we’re trying to figure out is if it’s worth the effort to build a mobile site for the amount of users you’re getting that are on these devices.

Even more interesting: trend this out over a longer period of time. What’s the trend? In my case, mobile traffic is going up…way up:

And even though the iPad is leading the way (which is interesting and worth digging into separately, demgraphic-wise), I still wanted a dedicated mobile site.

What Did I Do?

I’m a one-man operation so I needed an easy solution I could implement myself. That was cheap (free). So I looked around on other sites and the WordPress plugin I kept seeing was WPTouch. It’s great, gives you tons of options, and doesn’t get in the way of what users are after: your content.

Here’s what The Writer’s Coin looks like on a mobile device:

It literally took me about 20 minutes to get this going with all the options I wanted/needed. So if you’re on WordPress and your analytics report tells you your mobile traffic is increasing, I see no reason not to go ahead and give the people what they want.

Don’t forget to add your Google Analytics tracking code to the Settings area of WPTouch! Otherwise you’ll lose tracking on all those pages and it’ll look like your traffic is actually going down.

Image by Johan Larsson