Over the last several years, responsive design has made its way into being the most popular type of design used to build websites. It’s the reformatting of images and text on a website, making it easily accessible and viewable on different devices regardless of your screen size.
Why responsive design?
When visiting a site, you want the user to have the best experience possible and with the number of people accessing the web on a mobile device increasing each year you need to consider those users as well as your desktop users. According to Marketing Land, 80 percent of internet users are using smartphones to search the web. Visitors want to have an easy and enjoyable mobile experience or they will leave for a site that’s easier to navigate. (According to Google data, 61 percent of visitors will return to Google search if a website is not mobile friendly.)
A common misconception is that if a company doesn’t have a lot of mobile traffic, then they don’t have to worry about moving to responsive design. But users may not be engaging on mobile due to their bad experience. Users want to have a good experience on a site no matter what device they are viewing it from. Responsive design will help to do just that.
Responsive design benefits SEO
Another perk of responsive design is that Google favors it. When mobile became more popular people started creating separate desktop and mobile optimized sites. The downside to that is there are two separate links, one for mobile and one for desktop. By creating a website that is responsive you are only using one URL for your site and therefore eliminating redirection to a mobile or desktop version, depending on the device the site is being viewed on. Also, a single URL makes it easier to link and share your site with others, which will help your site’s SEO. And a single URL with a responsive site design prevents duplicate content, which confuses Google and causes your site to be penalized.
If that doesn’t convince you that it is time to switch to a responsive design then maybe this will:
- There are 1.2 billion mobile users worldwide (and growing).
- In the U.S. 25% of mobile users are mobile-only, meaning they rarely use a desktop.
- Responsive design allows for your site to adapt to be viewed and more easily managed on new technology.
We’ve recently updated our website to a responsive design. Take a look around – on any device you like.
