5 Essential Reasons You Should Be Using A Responsive Website Design Now
Responsive design is the “big thing” in web design right now. But if you are not a designer, you may be wondering what this term means. You might also be unsure as to whether or not your business’s website should be implementing responsive design, especially if you do not understand the concept.
What is a Responsive Website Design?
Responsive design can help you solve a lot of problems for your website. It will make your site mobile-friendly, improve the way it looks on devices with both large and small screens, and increase the amount of time that visitors spend on your site. It can also help you improve your rankings in search engines.
Read on to find out why responsive design is so important to your company’s website, and also read the responsive design pros and cons you should know about before investing in a redesign.
Why should you invest in responsive design?
We live in an Internet-powered world where 3.5 Billion (45.12% of the world's population) uses a smartphone and 54.2 million use multiple screens. Because of this, it’s important for your site to be viewable across as many devices as possible because you never know what device someone will be using to view your website.
Responsive website stats suggest that it’s wise 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.
Google recently 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:
Lower maintenance cost
Provides a seamless user experience
Future scalability
Improves search engine optimization (SEO) rankings
Easy to manage
Let’s take an in-depth look at each one of these 5 benefits so you can learn a little more about why you should invest in a responsive website.
1. LOWER MAINTENANCE COST
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 designing and maintaining two sites. You will only need to invest in one website that is responsive and appeals to all visitors and all devices.
2. PROVIDES A SEAMLESS USER EXPERIENCE
User experience is important to website owners. You want people to like your site, and you want it to be easy to use to convince them to buy what you are selling - services or products. 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. No one wants to do business with a place that looks unprofessional. But responsive design, which 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.
3. Future SCALABILITY
One of the best things about a responsive website is that this approach gives you the best chance to support newer devices and screens in the future. Responsive sites are fluid, scaling up or down as needed to best fit the screens being used to access the site.
4. Improves search engine optimization (SEO) rankings
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 gives preference to websites that are mobile-friendly.
5. EASy to MANAGE
Most businesses, especially smaller ones, don’t have a lot of time and money to keep updating or refreshing the way their website looks. But rather than having to hire a designer to handle every aspect of your website, responsive design allows you to make the changes yourself, quickly and easily. Additionally, with just one website, 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. Responsiveness takes much of the stress out of managing a business website.