Clickable Phone Numbers for WordPress Sites Are Imperative
As I said before when talking about the importance of Responsive Design, over 60% of web traffic is now done on mobile devices. So your website better play nicely with phones.
Playing nicely with phones doesn’t just mean that it looks good (though, of course, that’s always important). It also means that your website is easy to use for someone on a mobile device. And what’s a more ubiquitous mobile device than a smart phone?
Recently, I have overheard people quite a few people complaining about how they’ve looked up a website on their phone and tried to call the company, but they couldn’t click on the number because it wasn’t a link. Sure, they could have copy-and-pasted the number or just remembered it, but that’s not nearly as easy as clicking on a link.
People are lazy, so you want to make things as easy as possible for them. Now that everyone is used to being able to click on phone numbers on their phone, if your phone number doesn’t do that you’re going to annoy your potential customers. Trust me, needlessly annoying customers is not something you want to do.
So how do you make your phone number clickable and not annoy your customers?
You could always put a telephone number link around your phone number and make it clickable.
<a href="tel:9785555555">(978) 555-5555</a>But, I don’t recommend just doing this and nothing else. If you make your link clickable this way, it will show up as a link on a desktop computer too. Then, if people click on it they will get an error, or it will pull up Skype or FaceTime if they have one of those programs.
Instead, I would recommend the plugin Telephone Number Linker. This plugin checks to see if the device is mobile, and if it is (and only if it is) it will turn your phone number into a clickable link.
All you have to do is use the short code around your phone number, so it would look like:
[telnumlink](978) 555-5555[/telnumlink]And presto! Your phone number will be a clickable link on mobile devices but not on laptops and desktops.
So how about you? Can people click your phone number on a smart phone?