A responsive web design helps to solve a a lot of issues for your website. A responsive design will make your site mobile-friendly, improve the way it looks on devices with different screen sizes and increase the amount of time that visitors spend on your site. And most importantly, It can also help you improve your rankings in search engines.
In this article we’ll discuss why responsive design is important to your company’s website and business, and the responsive design pros and cons you should consider before investing in a redesign.
First, let’s explain what does responsive design mean exactly?
Definition:
A responsive design can be defined as a way to put together a website so that it automatically scales its content and elements to match the screen size on which it is viewed. It prevents images from being larger than the screen resolution, and facilitates visitors’ activity on your website. Furthermore, Responsive website design also alternates the old need to design a mobile-dedicated website for smartphone users
The prime goal of responsive design is to eliminate manual resizing, ,zooming, scrolling or panning that occurs with sites that have not been optimized for different devices. Usually, the user experience on websites lacking responsiveness is very poor. Hence, it may cost businesses potential customers.
With that being said, this leads us to the questions, why you should invest in a responsive website design?
It is important for your site to be accessible across all types of tech devices and gadgets used to browse the internet in our modern society, you never know what device someone will be using to view your website.
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.
Ericsson Mobility Report
In early 2015, Google has already announced that mobile-friendliness would become a ranking factor in its SEO algorithms. This meant that websites that are not mobile-friendly would potentially lose ranking in search engine results because they wouldn’t be providing a good experience to mobile users.
Other benefits of a responsive design include:
- Flexible
- Cost effective
- Better user experience
- SEO Friendly
- Easy to manage
We move on to study each added value of a responsive design separately:
Flexible:
Flexibility is a great advantage when you just want to make a quick design tweak or fix a typo on your site, you will only have to do it once. A website with responsive design enables you to make changes quickly and easily. You do not need to worry about making changes on two websites.
Cost effective:
Maintaining multiple websites for your mobile and non-mobile users can be very expensive. By deploying responsive design eliminates the extra costs of a mobile-dedicated site. You will only have to invest in a single design to appeal to all audiences and all devices.
Better user experience:
User experience is crucial elements to all websites. If mobile user visits you website, and it takes long to load or your pictures do not have the proper resolution, the digital facade of your business appear unprofessional to the visitor.
We can all agree upon the fact that no one wants to do business with an entity that seems unprofessional. With a responsive design, zooming and scrolling will be eliminated, content can be viewed quicker, and the overall impression that visitors have will be much more positive. Henceforth, you can generate more leads.
SEO friendly:
Many businesses employ search engine optimization, or SEO, to help them rank higher on Google’s search results pages. The higher you are on the list, the more likely it is that potential consumers will find you.
Responsive design may help with SEO since, as we mentioned above, Google prefers mobile-friendly websites. When combined with other SEO elements, responsiveness may provide a significant increase in search engine rankings.
Easy to manage:
Most businesses, particularly smaller ones, do not have a lot of time to update or give a fresh look to the appearance of their website. Instead of hiring a designer to manage every part of your website, responsive design enables you to make the adjustments yourself, swiftly and effortlessly.
Furthermore, with only one website, other aspects of your marketing will be very easier to handle. You’ll never have to worry if you should link to the mobile or desktop site in a social media update, or whether all of your redirect links will function to deliver the correct people to the proper site. Responsiveness alleviates much of the burden associated with running a company website.
If you’re ready to invest in a responsive website you are more than welcome to contact the design experts at Timelapse Agency to get a free, completely personalized quote making your site responsive!