What Is Responsive Web Design and Why Is It Important?
Responsive web design has quite frankly become somewhat of a buzzword. Everywhere you turn, you’ll hear developers swear by the need to make your website responsive. But is it just a fancy term or is there more than meets the eye? Well, one thing we can say for sure is that it’s not a fad. If anything, failing to make your website responsive could be the very thing that starves your website of traffic. Worse yet, it may even lead to SEO penalties by search engines. Read on to learn more about why you need to pay serious attention to responsive web design.
Responsive Web Design – What it is
Imagine you’ve visited a website on your laptop. The fonts look great, everything’s perfectly fine, and the layout and navigation are super smooth. Then, you switch to your smartphone to visit the same website. But, alas, something serious has happened.
The text is now all jumbled up, and it’s a nightmare to scroll down pages, while the typography looks off-place. What happened? Well, you’ve likely visited a website that has a very non-responsive design. This leads us to our point today – what is responsive web design? Well, the short answer is that it’s all about ensuring that your website displays superbly on screen sizes of all kinds. If viewers were to visit your website on a mobile phone, tablet, laptop or other device, they’d still have the same excellent user experience either way.
To achieve this, you’ll likely need to play your HTML and CSS cards right. Doing so ensures that the website automatically does the following actions to meet every device’s unique screen
needs:
- Enlarges
- Shrinks
- Hides certain elements
- Resizes, etc.
In a nutshell, a responsive web design involves adopting a website to a user’s device. Simply put, it’s all about ensuring your website looks good on all devices.
Why it is Extremely Important and Necessary – To Invest in Responsive Web Design in 2024
Did you know that 58.7% of all global website traffic between 2015 and 2023 came from mobile? That’s according to a study by Statista. This essentially means that over half of your viewers visit your website via mobile. That’s already more than enough reason to show the importance of responsive web design.
But just for good measure, I’ve also rounded up other key benefits below. Take a look.
1. Excellent Customer Experience
A great user experience is everything. That’s especially true if you’re using your website as a lead magnet. When you elevate the user experience with optimal viewing experiences adapted to each device, brand experiences improve. In turn, this bolsters your reputation and even enhances your word-of-mouth appeal.
2. Higher SEO Rankings
What’s the first thing you do when you land on a non-responsive website? You leave. But what happens when it’s perfectly optimized for your device? You’re likely to stay on and probably even explore more web pages. The point is, that a responsive web design can increase website dwell time. Furthermore, it improves other web aspects in line with Google’s Core Web Vitals guidelines. As a result, your website is viewed more favorably by search engines, which increases your rankings on search results pages.
3. Low Maintenance
In the past, we had to create different versions of a website for each device. You had a version for mobile, another for desktop computers and more devices in between. Responsive web design changes all that. You have just one website version, which adapts and customizes its layout to meet every device that accesses it. This means fewer websites, complexities and expenses to manage.
4. Faster Loading Time
Did you know that 53% of internet users leave a website if it takes over three seconds to load? Well, that’s according to research from Google itself. A responsive web design essentially minimizes the amount of data and code that needs to be loaded, by loading only the necessary resources as users scroll through your website. It also alleviates the need to redirect users to a device-friendly version. All this in turn ensures that your website is lightning-quick.
5. Advanced Analytics
The great thing about a responsive web design is that it allows you to collect data from all sorts of devices. From different screen sizes and orientations to different platforms as well, you can collect information across the board. This helps you understand user behavior extensively and make data-driven decisions to help you elevate user experiences even more.
6. Future Proofing
Things are changing quickly. Some mobile devices are getting smaller than ever, while others are realizing screen resolutions previously unheard of. Not to mention, we’re also noticing trends like notched screens and other unique designs. We expect this trend to continue long into the future. With a responsive web design, your website can adapt to any device. No matter what new technologies emerge 10 or 20 years from now, you can trust that your website will still look great.
7. More Viral Appeal
Want to go viral on social media? A responsive web design can do that for you. With the right design elements in the mix such as social media share buttons, you’ll urge loyal fans to act. This, in turn, can broaden your audience to help you bring in even more traffic. When search algorithms notice this, your rankings will be bumped up further to multiply your gains even more.
How Website Design & Development Helps your Business Profitable?
This definitive guide assists for serious entrepreneurs who wish to know the importance of website design and development.
A Successful Website Starts with a responsive Design
When your website has a responsive design, the chances of getting excellent SEO rankings greatly increase. This means that you’ll be able to increase the traffic and leads it gets. More importantly, this will also elevate user experiences thus increasing the chances of your visitors converting. Now that you know what a responsive web design is and what it brings to the table, all that’s left is implementing it. For this, you may need a proven SEO partner like Dot Com Infoway to show you the way. To learn more about web development services, click here to get a quick quote from us.
