Why is responsive web design the best business decision you have to make for your business?
Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach that creates dynamic changes to the appearance of a website, depending on the screen size and orientation of the device being used to view it. In simpler words, responsive web design is when a website automatically adjusts for different-sized screens and viewports. With a responsive website, someone can browse your website from any device and it will still look and function perfectly.
The goal of responsive design is to build web pages that detect the visitor’s screen size and orientation and change the layout accordingly.
The concept of responsive web design
In 2010 Ethan Marcotte wrote an introductory article about the approach, Responsive Web Design, for A List Apart.
In theory, developers have been creating responsive designs since there was more than one browser. Browsers have always had subtle (and not so subtle) rendering differences between them, and developers have been learning how to cope with these quirks for decades. If you’re new(er) to web development, be thankful for the dominance of Internet Explorer’s earlier versions is mostly over. The days of dealing with their quirks were dark.
Since 2004, responsive design has adopted the more specific meaning of adapting your designs to suit a user’s device of choice — typically based on screen size, but also other capabilities. The concepts for responsive design solidified in 2008, but the term is also referred to as “flexible”, “liquid”, “fluid”, and “elastic” design.
Responsive Web Design requires a more abstract way of thinking. However, some ideas are already being practiced: fluid layouts, media queries, and scripts that can reformat web pages and mark-up effortlessly (or automatically).
How does responsive web design work?
Responsive web design works through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), using various settings to serve different style properties depending on the screen size, orientation, resolution, color capability, and other characteristics of the user’s device. A few examples of CSS properties related to responsive web design include the viewport and media queries.
The three main components of responsive web design include:
- Fluid grid
- Flexible text & images
- Media queries
Fluid grids are based on designing a website layout on percentage values instead of set pixels. For instance, the width of content on a desktop screen could be 930px, but you want to target the design down to 320px on mobile. To convert this into a scalable figure, the result works out to be 320/930 = 34.4%. When you apply this to the mobile screen size the elements in the design layout will resize in relation to one another.
Fluid layouts are an undervalued commodity in web design. They put control of our designs firmly in the hands of our users and their browsing habits. They’ve also utterly failed to seize the imagination of web designers.
A grid sizes the elements of your site proportionally, rather than making them one specific size. This makes it easy when sizing things for different screens: the elements will respond to the size of the screen (that is, the grid), not the size they’re set to be in pixels.
A responsive grid is often divided into columns, and the heights and widths are scaled. Nothing has a fixed width or height. Instead, the proportions depend on how large the screen is.
You can set rules for this grid by modifying your website’s CSS.
Flexible text & images
The way to display text varies depending on what device a user is viewing your site on, but it should be readable no matter what. On mobile responsive websites, there is an opportunity to increase the font size and line-height (the spacing between each line of text) for legibility.
Flexible text and images adjust within a website layout width, according to the content hierarchy set with the CSS (stylesheet). Text can now be legible regardless of the end user’s device. With a flexible container (within the grid), text can wrap with an increase in font size on smaller devices.
Flexible images can prove to be more challenging because of load times on smaller device browsers. But these images can scale, crop, or disappear depending on what content is essential to the mobile experience.
Media queries are a type of code that will get implemented into your site when it gets built. It is important to have them in your code because they set the conditions for the design to magically adapt to the size of the screen. Media queries allow for multiple layouts of a design, which use the same HTML-coded web page.
Eg. “when the screen size is equal to 480px or less, change to mobile design layout”. Try it out now by simply dragging your browser window smaller (if you’re on a desktop). You’ll see the content automatically resize to the varying design breakpoints of the screen.
Essential business values of responsive web design
We live in a multi-screen society. Because of this, your site needs to be viewable across as many devices as possible because you never know what device someone will be using to view your website.
Statistics show a rapid increase in smartphone usage in the past decade, and that it’s the reason every modern business to appeal to both desktop and mobile viewers. The number of mobile viewers now outnumbers desktop, and this number will only continue to rise as global smartphone accessibility increases. Mobile-first shifts the paradigm of a website user experience. It is the most important digital strategy of every digital marketer and every business owner, and if not, it must be.
Additionally, Google announced that mobile-friendliness would become a ranking factor in its search engine algorithms. This meant that sites that were mobile-friendly would potentially lose some ground in search engine results because they wouldn’t be delivering a good experience to mobile searchers and viewers.
In summary, the benefits of choosing a responsive design for your website include:
- Cost-effectiveness
- Improved user experience
- Better website loading times
- Search engine optimization gains
- Lower bounce rates
- Higher conversion rates
- Ease of management and data analytics
- More social sharing
Let’s take an in-depth look at each one of these benefits so you can learn a little more about why you should invest in a responsive website.
Cost-effectiveness
Maintaining separate sites for your mobile and non-mobile audiences can get expensive. By using responsive design, you can save money by eliminating the cost of paying for a mobile site. You will only need to invest in single-site design to appeal to all visitors and all devices.
Improved user experience
User experience is crucial to website owners. In fact, web design is and should be user-centric. You want people to visit your website, stay as long as possible and when they leave, to persuade them to come back. If someone visits your website on a mobile device, and it takes forever to load or your pictures do not have the proper resolution, it can make your company appear unprofessional.
Responsive design offers a much better user experience, can help convince people to give your company a chance. Because zooming and scrolling will be eliminated, content can be viewed quicker, and the overall impression that visitors have will be much more positive.
Better website loading times
Today, users have no patience for websites with poor load speeds or inadequate performance. According to research, if a website doesn’t load in 2 seconds or less, 53% of mobile visitors will abandon the website. Thanks to responsive images and fluid grids, it takes significantly less time for a page to load, which has a direct impact on the duration of your user’s visit. The same research shows that websites that load fast benefit from more time spent on-site as well as improved conversion rates. This speaks volumes about responsive web design importance.
Search engine optimization gains
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a strategy used by many companies to help boost themselves in Google’s search page rankings. The closer you are to the top, the better the chance potential customers will find you.
Responsive design can help with SEO because Google takes into consideration the responsiveness of your website as one of the signals that determine the rank of your website in the search engine results page. In combination with other SEO factors, responsiveness can help give you a big boost in search engine results.
It’s worth mentioning that a responsive website can help you when it comes to building backlinks. Backlinks play an important role in any SEO strategy because they show search engines that other websites consider your site a reputable source of information. If your site isn’t responsive, other websites will be less inclined to link to you. After all, linking to a website that doesn’t provide a good user experience makes them look bad as well.
Lower Bounce Rates
The bounce rate signifies the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after seeing a single page only. As mentioned above, a responsive website means visitors will stay on your site longer which reduces your bounce rate. Visitors will be more inclined to click through and read other pages on your site and explore everything you’ve got to offer.
Higher Conversion Rates
More time on your site and lower bounce rate are good first steps to improving your visitor’s user experience and building trust. That improved user experience and trust lead to better conversion rates, whether conversion means signing up for your newsletter, making a purchase or booking a call. Consider for a moment that average smartphone conversion rates are up by 64% compared to desktop and it’s easy to see why a responsive website is a must.
Ease of management and data analytics
Additionally, with just one website, all the data and other elements of your marketing will be much easier to manage. You’ll never have to wonder if you should link the mobile or desktop site on a social media update, or question whether or not all of your redirect links will be working to get the right visitors to the right site. Your website stats are greatly simplified as you’re staying on top of a single set of data, and you won’t need to read data from multiple reports to get an accurate picture. Responsiveness takes much of the stress out of managing a business website.
More social sharing
When done correctly, responsive web design can lead to an increase in social shares for your content. This is another one of the responsive web design benefits. Responsive content paired with responsive social media buttons makes it easy to share links to your site’s pages even on smaller screens. This can help increase your credibility and expose you to a new audience, which then leads to more traffic and more conversions. At the same time, social signals can also impact your search engine rank indirectly because search engines will notice the increased engagement and search demand.
