Designing a WordPress site means juggling a lot at once. Layout, color scheme, fonts, and how the thing behaves once someone starts clicking. Then it has to hold up on every device and browser your visitors bring to it.
The good news is that most of it comes down to a handful of habits. Use a responsive theme. Keep your pages light. Use high-quality images. Write content people can read without squinting, and test the site on real devices and browsers before you call it done. Here is how we handle each one.
What is a responsive theme?
A responsive theme is a type of WordPress theme that automatically adjusts to the size of the device it is being viewed on. This means that the theme will look different on a desktop computer, a laptop, a tablet, and a smartphone.
The payoff is that you build one site instead of three. There is no separate mobile version to keep in sync, and no desktop version quietly drifting out of date. The layout reflows to fit whatever screen it lands on, from a phone to a big desktop monitor.
Why should I use a responsive theme?
If you only get one thing right in the build, make it the theme. A responsive theme handles every screen size for you, so the site holds together on a phone, a tablet, or a laptop without you maintaining a second copy of it anywhere. You design it once. The screen size sorts itself out on the visitor's end.
If you're not sure if your theme is responsive, you can use Responsive Design Checker to test it. You can also use google chrome to check it directly from your browser, here is ablog post on how to do that. These tools allow you to view your site on different devices and browsers.
How do I know if my theme is responsive?
There are a couple of other ways to check. Preview Live Viewer and BrowserStack both load your site on devices and browsers you do not own. Pull up the ones your visitors actually use and look for what breaks.
Tips for using high-quality images in your blog posts or website
Use good images, and optimize every one of them before it goes up. An optimized file still looks sharp, takes up less space on your server, and loads faster than the raw export it came from.
Here are a few tips for using high-quality images in your blog posts or website:
Use high-resolution images.
Choose the right file format.
Optimize your images for the web.
Use a quality image editor.
Use a reliable image hosting service.
Display your images correctly (I.e. landscape for landscape image placement and portrait for portrait image placement).
Use the correct dimensions for your images.
How to keep your pages lightweight
Start with the theme again. A responsive theme adjusts to the device it is being viewed on, so a phone is not forced to render a layout built for a desktop. That keeps mobile pages quicker to load.
A content delivery network helps too. A CDN keeps copies of your images and other static files on servers around the world, so visitors download them from whichever one is closest instead of from your origin server every time. Shorter trip, faster page. The farther your readers sit from your host, the more you notice it.
A compression plugin is worth adding on top of that. It squeezes your images and other files down on the way out, so there is simply less to send over the wire. Pages come in quicker.
How to keep your website content easy to read
Short paragraphs and plain sentences do most of the work here. Headings and subheadings do the rest. People scan a page before they commit to reading it, and headings give them somewhere to land on the way down.
Good images earn their spot twice over. They look better than a wall of gray text, and they break a long stretch of copy into pieces the eye can get through.
You can also use fonts that are easy to read, such as Arial or Tahoma. And finally, be sure to use proper spacing between your paragraphs and lines.
In Conclusion
When it comes to creating a WordPress website, one of the most important things to consider is quality content, is your theme responsive, and do you have high-quality images? In this article, we've shared a few tips for keeping your website content easy to read. We recommend using short paragraphs and simple sentences, as well as headings and subheadings to break up your text. You should also use high-quality images to break up the text and make it easier to read. Finally, make sure that your website uses a responsive theme so that it can be viewed on all devices.