Many people are now primarily interacting with the web via smart phones. This means that a high quality mobile experience is much more essential than it has ever been before when it comes to your WordPress site. So many more users are searching through the websites and online shopping through their devices. Sometimes, though, it just isn’t succinct or specific enough for mobile users’ needs. However often it is not simple or precise enough for the demands of mobile users hence the need of a more convenient way of bringing light to user experience via apps. Mobile apps provide the content easily and provide improved user experience. Additionally, building a mobile app is one way of ensuring that traffic reaches your site quickly due to the quick accessibility
The general experience for your mobile users can be changed in several aspects. For example, a responsive site can be built to look and function correctly on small screens. Some essential WP plugins such as WooCommerce help you to build a business site for e-commerce (store), handle inventory and accept payments and much more. It contains nearly all the features you need to set up an online shop. And it still has several specialized features for its extension framework. It allows you to market online goods or services in a quite inexpensive and open way from your WordPress platform into a mobile application. Through integrating this whole system and process via app your users/visitors are more likely to to use your site more frequently.
Well, if you’ve developed a good WordPress platform by now, then don’t stress about a mobile app for the same . The much-needed DIY solution still has been preferred to be the use of plugins and other methods. You can build a different web and mobile site platform for your target audience with these WordPress plugins. However let us first dive into why you would need this for now.
Reasons Your Site May Require a Mobile App
As mentioned before a WordPress website with good mobile responsiveness, its layout is tailored to the screen size of the customer device. Nearly every good theme from WordPress is mobile responsive by default. Just like in the example of Woo commerce we cited in the intro part, a new report reveals how customers use their mobile apps which is as follows:
- Looking for digital coupons that are not available anywhere else online.
- Looking for special offers.
- Searching products to add to wish lists or shopping carts to purchase later
- Going through upcoming sales alerts.
This case also applies to membership or community websites where users are actively looking through their activity feeds, instant communication, and uploading content to profiles among other things. These are some advantages you may have by appifying your website. Technically, Apps provide a more native experience for mobile devices whereby you as the site admin can use notifications to stay in touch with your user base. If you use subscriptions, they can be managed via mobile payment systems.
WordPress users can use multi plugins and platforms to build a mobile application version of their website. You can choose the approach best suited to your needs with a range of pricing and easy-to-use options.Here are some of the recommendations we opt to showcase in this article.
WordPress Mobile App Platforms
This is quite easy to use and has a dedicated WordPress mobile theme that further creates the mobile app for your WordPress site.
AppPresser may not be ideal for non-developers as it needs intensive customizing if your site needs to be modified from the basics. It comes with a dedicated WordPress mobile theme that can be used to create an app for your blog, WooCommerce store, or BuddyPress site. After creating your mobile app from your WP site some of the features you will enjoy include:
- Design navigation as pull-out menu or tabs
- WordPress plugin and extension compatibility, so you can bring in things like Facebook login, camera connectivity, Google maps, and social sharing
- Create custom pages from any content on your site
- Push notification functionality
Though it brands to be easy in nature, It requires extensive customization to build your app from scratch and actually make it work as an app. So, consider this plugin if you have a developer’s assistance at your side.
This is a WP plugin which would recommend users to choose if they have a website focused on content, such as news and blog websites. Due to this it does not support sites with heavy plugins like Buddypress and Woocommerce This plugin converts your blog feed into a friendly mobile responsive layout.
It provides offline support, different templates, support for internationalization, endless push notifications, infinite scrolling, and native social sharing. Other features offered by the plugin include:
- Monetize your app using Admob and Appnext ad units
- Image Zoom, Share and Save
- Parallax Effect for Featured image on post detail page
- Caching – option to use WP Super cache to cache mobile app requests at server side.
- Dynamic Settings for Menu, Image Rendering, Preview Text, Share Text, Post Page settings, Ads placements, Notification Style, Theme Colors and more.
Although there are possibilities for the plugin to help users to create an iOS app, technically as of now this feature is still beta. Thus, if you need this plugin, do this in order to exclusively launch it for Android, at least for now.
Although MobiLoud is categorized as a free plugin for download within the WordPress plugin respiratory, it is a premium mobile app builder. Instead the mobile platform is accessible and you entrust the company to building a mobile app on your site.
This platform is designed to change any mobile optimized WordPress site into a mobile app, including directory sites, conference and event sites, job portals, and more. They provide two solutions: One primarily designed for blog or news websites to be turned into apps and the other that facilitates the switching to mobile version on all other high traffic sites. MobiLoud provides fast, truly native apps designed for iOS and Android. Among other features it provides include:
- Design for your own icon is used, launch images, logo and UI colors for your mobile app
- Unlimited automatic and manual push notifications to your mobile app users
- Customizable mobile app menu with pages, categories, tags, custom taxonomies and links
- User preferences for push notifications, so they stay in control of what they receive
- Support for posts, pages, categories, custom post types and custom fields, in your mobile app like on your website.
- Support for videos, images, galleries and almost every HTML5 widget you can embed in your mobile app’s content.
- Advertising with mobile app specific ad solutions.
The app is designed, equipped and can also be submitted for you in app stores. You can also get your help in developing analysis, monetization and more for higher plans in the platform.
Web2Application.com plugin helps users convert responsive websites into applications and enable the use of other advanced features. Setting-up is straightforward, however that doesn’t mean that the performance of the mobile app developed from it cannot be compromised.
While it doesn’t operate perfectly like an app that requires huge sums of money to create, it has enough customization to make it an acceptable and inexpensive alternative.
Some of the interesting mobile app features you can get with this plugin include:
- App rating score for Google Play User reviews
- Startup splash screen
- Various ways of viewing and navigating mobile apps
- Social engagement
- Deep linking
- Smart download link and QRcode
- Add tab menu to your app
They also have a video guide for you in particular so that you can conveniently build your mobile app with this plugin.
WappPress is a really basic plug-in for WordPress, which is used to build an Android mobile app. It is filled with useful functions like Admob, customized launcher icon, optimized splash screen, and instant app build in real time. This means users can convert any WordPress website into an Android app in real time. Apps built with WappPress can update, & sync data instantly in the platform when data changes.
You could send notifications to all your users and involve them more directly than e-mails or ads and can only boost your performance. Most people have used WappPress and are fully satisfied with the plugin as it is very simple and easy to use, you also do not need any coding skills to use it. Once you have built your mobile app, you can simply publish it on Google’s Play Store on your own.
Which Platform Would You Choose?
While this is a cheap and speedy way to turn a WordPress website into a mobile app, please do not forget that this is indeed an app like any other which needs to be as thorough and maintained as a website, if not more. When it comes to mobile app builders from WP sites, there is no absence of app makers to help you get on with such a project on whatever scale. You will save a lot of time. It is clearly difficult to hire experts and skilled developers if you are on a budget because even a basic application will potentially cost you large amounts of money. This means you can find your way to meet your target audience and improve user engagement with one of these plug-ins that convert your WordPress Website into a mobile app. Let us know what your favourite platform is when it comes to converting your WordPress site into an app.
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