Your blog, on a phone

If you haven't done so lately, read your blog on a phone.

At least some of your readers do. ¶ 

(If you haven't got a phone, there's a workaround below.) ¶ 

Do you like what you see?

In this blog post:

• Assess your mobile traffic
• View the mobile version of your blog

Depending on your choice of Blogger theme you may have different options for how your blog looks on a tablet or phone.

Here are the steps for a do-it-yourself audit of your blog's mobile identity.

1. Do you care about mobile traffic?

For a rough idea of how people read your blog, open the Stats page of your blog's dashboard. 

Select a year (or other time period), and then scroll down past the stats for "last post" to the chart that summarizes all the page views of your blog.

Click "more about this blog" at left below that chart to see a page with different breakdowns about your readers: country, referring websites, browser, and so forth.

Scroll down to "Pageviews by Operating Systems." Top mobile systems are listed as as Android as iPhone, and there are others.

Views in Blogger Stats may include bots.

These data may be skewed towards desktop by bots, but they give you an idea of how many page views come from mobile during the period you specified.

(If you have a Google Analytics account for the blog (free, but fussy), there is a breakdown that is more accurate.)

If you do not care about those readers, then you need read no further. But if you do,

2. View your blog on a phone and/or tablet

Click around to see what different pages look like and how navigation works. Some things to check:

• How do blog posts look? Are they easy to scroll through? Check a number of posts and pages.
• Is the typeface legible?
• How do images look? Do they fit into the screen without distortion? Are they legible?
• If you have a navigational widget (of links to key pages), is it still available in mobile? Is it obvious and easy to navigate?
• If you have a sidebar, how easy is it to find?
• Can you search the blog?

Do you like what you see?

No Phone?

If you do not have a phone, do this:

Open a new browser window on your computer and drag the side and bottom to be roughly the same size as a phone. (Don't worry if you can't make it small enough.)

Then type the web address of your blog into the address bar, adding this at the end: ?m=1. Hit return.

That's your mobile view, more or less. (Probably the font size is a bit smaller on a phone.)

3. Assess your options

You do not need to do anything. But you might want to make changes based on your audit.

You can make minor changes, such as a different font, using Blogger's Customizer (from the Theme page).

There are tradeoffs involved in every choice you make.

The choices are particularly stark if you use one of the so-called Designer themes (Simple, Picture Window, Awesome Inc., Watermark, Etherial, and Travel).

With these themes, your options are as follows:

Set the mobile view to web view. Mobile readers will see a complete tiny web page on their phone. They can drag, pinch, unpinch etc. to view and move around the page.

Set the mobile view to one of the mobile themes. These generally present the blog posts in a more straightforward way, but with navigation that not as good as desktop.

Switch to a responsive theme. These themes do a good job in mobile. However, they list blog posts in "snippet" form on the home page and similar search pages, for both mobile and desktop modes.

Also, some of the navigation is compromised compared to Designer's desktop view.

These choices are available from your Blogger dahsboard.

Note

This blog post responds to some of the things readers said in extensive comments to another post. Worth reading!

A big thanks to my readers.

Update: Here are options for mobile themes if you use a theme older than 2017.

Berthold Werner made the image of an old-fashioned rotary telephone available for use under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported License, and similar licenses.