Responsive wordpress question

wonga77

Hi guys, looking for a little help, a friend has asked me to take a look at a site that was built for him 3 or 4 years ago, It was built with wordpress and the actual site itself is decent enough, however its not responsive and thats started to cause one or two issues for him.
He wants to keep content and layout as it is but wants it responsive, is it better to recreate the whole site from scratch with a responsive theme or use one of the many plugins (which I have zero experience with) I see advertised.
Any opinions most welcome!

mneylon

I'm not aware of any plugins that would make a theme "responsive", though there are plugins that can render a "mobile friendly" version of a site when accessed from a mobile device.

You might be better off finding a more current theme that is responsive and rebuilding the site's layout using it.

wonga77

Thanks for the reply, I was thinking of something like jetpack or WPtouch Mobile Plugin but as you say they will only make it mobile friendly and not actually fully responsive which is what he's after. Rebuilding it from scratch is probably the best option moving forward I guess

If it was built on something like a themeforest theme, it may be that you can just update the theme and add responsive functionality that way.

Either way, you shouldn't need to rebuild it from scratch in that you have wordpress, plugins and content - all that needs to change is the look of the site. You can test drive another theme while the site visitors continue to see the old design using something like
https://wordpress.org/plugins/theme-test-drive/

Trojan

Most of those plugins deliver a different theme to the visitor after detecting they're on a mobile device, rather than actually making the existing theme responsive in some way.

It is a fast and cheap way to get device compatibility, but ideally you'll have a fully responsive theme.

wonga77

I think i was a little mislead by the promise of some of the plugins, Theres no magic wand, just find a suitable theme and tweak until it looks right.
I was only curious as theres close to 100 pages so im not sure timewise how long it will take

daymobrew

wonga77 wrote: »

I was only curious as theres close to 100 pages so im not sure timewise how long it will take

You will not be changing 100 pages but rather the one template file that displays them (there may be more than 1 template file in use but the number will probably be small).

M.T.D

As an addition to daymobrew's comment you should only have to edit individual pages if you have items with fixed width and height that won't scale. Can happen, but not always with tables, divs and the images. Another consideration is with already small items that are on a page, they can shrink very small if they do not have min-widths. Once the new theme is in place and you are creating new content then this would not be a worry.

If your existing theme uses any kind of "pagebuilder" with short codes then you will have some cutting and pasting to do to move the content in to WordPress's editor. Do this before you swap themes.
If your site needs to be kept online and functioning, then put a new install of WordPress in a folder, duplicate the database or copy content, do your changes and make sure it all works before swapping to the new install.

If there's heavy use of theme-dependent shortcodes, it could also cause problems in that the shortcodes won't work on a new theme, and you'll need to add plugins and change the shortcode syntax accordingly.