FAQs About Specific Content For Mobile

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW TO UNDERSTAND SPECIFIC CONTENT FOR MOBILE.

DEFINITIONS.
Browser. The program you use to visit a web page (e.g. Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari…).
Server. Hardware + software that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients (browsers and client devices). The files of your website are stored on the server. On the same server runs the software to build the pages of your website.
PHP. The programming language that runs on the server.
HTML.Markup language interpreted by the browser.
CSS. The language used to style the HTML document and define how the HTML should be displayed in the browser.
Responsive design. The approach to web design that makes web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes from minimum to maximum display size. The responsive design is made with CSS.

HOW IT WORKS (simplified, not exhaustive, and with some imprecisions to be clearer).
When you visit a web page of your website, the server runs the so-called PHP to build that page. Before the webpage is ready, WordPress calls all the files of the core, plugins, and theme and gets all the information from the database.
The content of the pages is stored in the database.
When the page is ready the server sends it to the browser and you can see it.
What you see on your browser depends on how the page is in terms of structure given by the HTML and the style given by the CSS.
The CSS is interpreted by the browser.

Specific Content For Mobile does nothing else than replace the content of a web page with the content of the mobile version. It works only on the server. After the page is ready, and the server sends it to the browser, Specific Content For Mobile has no control of what happens on the browser.
The code of Specific Content For Mobile runs only on the server. It detects if the device is mobile or desktop and if you have defined a mobile version, it replaces the content, nothing else.

How the page will appear on the device will depend on the CSS and responsive design.

If you connected a CDN with a full-page cache, activated a caching plugin, or the cache is enabled directly on your server, then be sure the caching system serves a separate cache for mobile.

The mobile pages, e.g. https://your-website.com/example-page-mobile/, are only for the backend, and for not logged users they don’t exist.

If you have e.g. https://your-website.com/example-page/, when you are logged in, the related mobile version is https://your-website.com/example-page-mobile/, but visitors always have to see https://your-website.com/example-page/.

The only page that is public is https://your-website.com/example-page/.

This plugin doesn’t redirect the users to the mobile version, it replaces the content of https://your-website.com/example-page/ with the content of https://your-website.com/example-page-mobile/, but https://your-website.com/example-page/ doesn’t exist for people who are not logged-in.

This is to avoid SEO problems related to duplicated content and avoid redirections that would slow down the page loading. This is also the reason the plugin makes it impossible to save the mobile page as public. The mobile page is only for the backend or if you want to have a look when you are logged in.

Having a mobile page for the backend allows Specific Content For Mobile to take advantage of whatever page builder you have, then when the users visit the page, if the user has a mobile device, it replaces the desktop content with the mobile content taking it from the mobile page.

If you are not logged in and you visit https://your-website.com/example-page-mobile/ you will have a 404 page, because that page doesn`t exist for not logged users.

If you have a plugin for server cache, be also careful it distinguishes between desktop and mobile server cache.

The following plugins can create different server caches, for mobile and desktop versions:
– W3 Total Cache
– WP Fastest Cache

Probably also other plugins will give you this possibility, just check it.

Yes, they are. However, you can ask SCFM to consider them as non-mobile devices by selecting “Consider all tablets as non-mobile devices” in Specific Content For Mobile => Tablets