6 Best WordPress Responsive Testing Tools
Creating a visually stunning and fully functional website is a priority for any WordPress developer or designer. With mobile devices contributing to 56.8% of global web traffic, ensuring your website looks and performs flawlessly on all platforms is a major part of this effort. Responsive design is design that adapts automatically to the screen size it’s viewed on. Most WordPress themes these days are responsive by default, but there’s always at least some tweaking to do, plus some elements may not be properly optimized. And that’s where WordPress responsive testing tools come into play.
In this article, we’ve compiled the best responsive testing tools, checkers and emulators to help you streamline the process of ensuring your website is responsive and ready to captivate users on every device. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting your WordPress journey, these tools will be your go-to resources for achieving pixel-perfect responsiveness.
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Here’s a tool that most WordPress users (and not just WordPress) are probably familiar with. Most browsers have a similar tool, but we’ll be focusing on Chrome since it’s one of the most popular browsers and it’s excellent for checking how your pages look on different size screens. There are plenty of things you can use your browser’s inspect tool for, and to access it in chrome, all you need to do is right-click anywhere on your page and select Inspect at the bottom of the dropdown menu.
Click on the device toggle to enter the Responsive Design Mode, where you can set the dimensions to inspect, and the Responsive menu will feature a number of devices, from iPhone and iPad to Pixel and Samsung Galaxy. Simply select the device you want and see how your page will behave on that screen.
Another browser-based tool for Chrome you should check out is the Responsive Viewer Chrome Extension. All you need to do to use this extension is to install it from the Chrome web store. To install the extension, simply click on Add to Chrome, after which the extension will appear in your browser’s toolbox. There’s also the option of setting a keyboard shortcut in the extension details dashboard.
To use the extension, simply click on it or activate it using the shortcut. The default view will show several most popular screen sizes. If the screen you’re looking for isn’t displayed by default, you can add it to the list of active screens. The tool also features a zoom tool, plus you can opt to stack screens horizontally, switch to landscape mode and take screenshots of all the screens. Overall, it’s a feature-rich tool covering all the most widely used screen sizes that you can activate easily whenever you need it.
Moving on with our selection of the best WordPress testing tools, Responsive Design Checker is a web-based solution that you can use to inspect any page you want, by entering its URL. The tool will show you the default desktop version and in the left-hand side menu you can pick whether you want to view the page for mobile and tablet, too. Selecting the device type, you will see a menu with the most common device models you can check.
This tool throttles requests, meaning that you can’t submit more than five URLs during a five-minute period. Also note that it doesn’t inspect non-HTTPS websites.
If you need a web-based tool with slightly more options than the previous one, check out the Responsive Test Tool. It comes with preset screen size options for various models of smartphones, tablets, desktop screens, but also television and custom screen sizes. It also features a rotating tool, scroll enabler and W3 validator. Responsive Test Tool, unlike the Responsive Design Checker, also comes with a handy ruler.
Responsinator is another simple web-based app for checking whether your pages are responsive and mobile-friendly. It’s a free tool, but they gladly accept donations (through a quite frank “Say thanks and buy us beer!” link). The tool by default works with HTTPS websites, but if your website is HTTP, Responsinator directs you to the non-HTTP mode, which is a plus compared to the previous tools that only work with HTTPS.
Responsinator features actual device frames so you can get the perfect picture of what your website looks like on different devices. The problem is, however, that there aren’t that many devices to choose from. You can check for responsiveness (vertical and horizontal view) on iPhone X, iPhone 6-8, iPhone 6-8 Plus, Pixel 2 and iPad.
The tool is great for quick checks on these common devices, and it has a great interface, but if you need to check more breakpoints, it won’t do.
We’re finishing off our list of the best WordPress responsive tools (and not just for WordPress, of course!) is Am I Responsive, a super-simple and fast URL checker.
This tool is pretty frank about what it does, and it says so right there on the landing page. It’s not the ideal testing tool, since it doesn’t offer a lot of preset device screen sizes nor does it allow you to manually enter the dimensions. It is, however, a great tool for getting a quick preview of your pages on mobile, and it’s great for working with clients and letting them know what their website will look like on various devices.
Finally, Google has its own Mobile-Friendly Test tool, which doesn’t exactly measure responsiveness but rather whether a page is mobile-friendly and therefore suitable to meet the search engine’s ranking factors.
After entering the URL you want to inspect, the URL inspection tool will pick the URL that was last indexed as the best mobile version of any canonical URL, which means it will follow redirects, rel=alternate and AMP versions.
The tool gives you two verdicts: Page is usable on mobile and Page is not usable on mobile. For more details and for monitoring mobile friendliness of the entire website, you should check the Search Console.
Wrapping It Up
You’ve probably noticed that none of the tools featured on this list is a WordPress plugin. That’s because for testing the responsiveness of your pages, you don’t really need to burden your website with yet another plugin. We proposed only web-based solutions and browser tools, which are all free, easy to access and rather fast. They can give you a clear picture of how your pages will look and behave on different screen sizes. For the best choice of preset devices, we suggest you use the Responsive Design Checker or Responsive Test Tool. The good old Chrome Inspect Tool also provides a lot of presets, and also gives you a glimpse in the underlying code. For quick and simple solutions covering the most common device types, Responsinator and Am I Responsive will do.
Either way, if you opted for one of the premium WordPress themes available on the market right now, like our own themes here at Qode Interactive, your design will already be responsive out of the box. You can use the tools we suggested to double-check everything is fine, and to keep track of whether the design changes you make (should you make any) are up to standards of responsive design.
If there’s a tool you like to use for this purpose that we haven’t mentioned in this list, do tell us about it in the comments below, and feel free to share your best practices when it comes to responsive design!
