WordPress is one of the most popular CMS in the world with 59% of market share and 72.4 million WordPress blogs (dated back to 2013) and the forthcoming v.4.0 release will bring us a lot of new features. However, in these days mobiles rule the Internet with nearly 50% of Internet traffic consumed from mobiles and tables. So, how WordPress 4.0 is ready to surf content to mobile users?

In this article we will review the readiness of WordPress 4 beta 1 with default theme to address mobile needs of customers to successfully access and navigate WordPress sites from different devices.

WordPress on Desktops

Let’s start with the simple WordPress 4 blog post containing images and text rendered across 25 desktop browsers:





The public blog post renders successfully across modern desktop browsers on Windows, MacOS and Linux. There are no severe layout issues preventing uses from accessing content:

Content fits the page width

Font selections is great and no line breaks due to font weight differences between browsers

Text flows nicely around images

a few rendering issues

Missing quick navigation left menu in IE9, IE8, Opera on Windows – the actual navigation appears in the page's footer instead

Scroll bar overlaps with headers in IE 11 and IE10

WordPress 4 on Mobiles

However, there arewith WordPress in Internet Explorer:

We tested WordPress 4 Beta 1 on 10 mobile devices and tablets (iPhone, iPad, Android phone and tables) and results are quite impressive – it renders with less issues than on browsers desktops:





All devices render content without glitches and missed controls. Content is nicely aligned to the devices' width without any horizontal scrolling, and left quick navigation menu moves to the bottom of the page on devices with small resolution.

However, we have found a few usability issues across mobiles:

Redundant spacing between paragraphs in left navigation menu when it renders on the bottom of the page. The menu renders in one column without using any space on the right side of the screen. It may frustrate users to scroll page down too far.

The post’s subtitle has small controls (date, user name, comments, reply) which may frustrate users on touch devices, due to accidentally hitting the nearby controls

Summary

The WordPress 4.0 is the most promising forthcoming release that is truly adapted to mobile devices and renders better than on desktop browsers. However, there are still some small glitch issues, such as small controls and not optimized quick navigation menu, but they won’t block users from accessing content.

Desktop browser rating : 4 of 5

: 4 of 5 Mobile browser rating: 4.5 of 5

Testing results: https://shots.testize.com/Results/Shared/34a971a1-a9d5-4199-9a66-f32159a513f7