Your mobile optimized site is complete! You’ve beat the April 21 Google deadline and your mobile site is ready to ensure your customers the most user-friendly website experience of their lives, right? Not so fast. Now it is time to make sure your site visitors are properly redirected from your desktop site to the mobile optimized site.
Redirect scripts are installed in a desktop site and tells the site to automatically send customers visiting your site from a mobile phone to the mobile website instead of the desktop site. Mobile redirects are installed on your homepage, and every other page that you would like to redirect to the mobile version.
The scripts are about 2 lines long and will typically resemble this, note that this is Vici’s specific redirect script and cannot be used for any site:
<script src=”http://static.mobilewebsiteserver.com/redirect.js” type=”text/javascript”></script><script type=”text/javascript”>Mobile_redirect(“http://mobile.vicimediainc.com”);</script>
Depending on where your desktop site is hosted, redirect directions can vary slightly. However, the general steps of pasting the code after the <head> tag are all the same. Here are the steps to install a mobile redirect on WordPress:
First, log in to the dashboard or administrator section of the site.
Locate the “Editor” section of the site.
Then, locate the Templates header, likely on the right hand side of your screen.
Locate the Header button, click it, and find the <head> tag in the template. You can click CTRL+F or search “Find” on your computer and type in <head> to locate it quickly.
Copy and paste the redirect code directly after the <head> tag.
Save or update the changes you made to the template file.
Check out your new and improved mobile optimized site! You should now be redirected to the mobile site when you search for/visit your desktop site on a mobile device.
Keep in mind that any time a change is made to the HTML script of your site, it can take up to 24 hours to adjust. So do not panic if you cannot see your savvy new mobile site right away! If 24 hours comes and goes and your mobile site is still not visible, double check the placement of your redirect code and make sure all changes made in the template are saved.
