Gone are the days when you had to pinch and zoom on a shrunken version of a site on your smartphone for better viewing. Responsive web design overcomes these non-optimal experiences by creating a mobile-friendly website.
Responsive web design is quickly becoming the benchmark for every website. The increasing use of the internet and proliferation of web applications on tablet and mobile devices have been the driving force behind this development. Besides its impressive design and high functionalities, the responsiveness of a website plays a big role to win over the audience. Businesses thrive on consumers, and a responsive website makes it easier for people to access the information on the site, leading to increased traffic.
Responsive web design is a technique to build a website that automatically scales its content and design elements according to the screen size of the user device for ideal viewing. The aim is to avoid the need for manually resizing, zooming, scrolling or panning to view content while keeping the look and feel of the website uniform on any device. The fluid and flexible layout of a responsive web design offer an optimized user experience on a desktop (or laptop), a tablet, and a mobile phone. That is why all the web designs the Grove86 team creates for its clients include responsive web design services by default.
With the staggering growth of mobile devices and usages such as social media, apps, games and websites, it is crucial for a business to build a mobile-friendly responsive website. This makes it easier for clients and business prospects to access the information and services they are looking for. Here are some of the major benefits of responsive website design for business.
The advantage of having a responsive design is the greater likelihood of ranking high in search results. Along with other SEO factors, the Google algorithm update stresses the importance of responsive web design for ranking better on the search engine. Hence, a non-responsive website is likely to rank lower in search engine results.
Statistics show that the majority of all global web traffic is from mobile devices. This only goes on to prove the importance of having a responsive website that automatically renders on all mobile devices. With a responsive design, your website not only becomes competitive with a higher rank but you can expect more organic traffic to your site.
A responsive design gives users an improved site experience with easy navigation or system use across devices, performance, functionality, and consistent look and feel. As visitors stay more on the site, they build trust and loyalty, which have a positive impact on the conversion rate while lowering the bounce rate. Market research indicates that the average conversion rate is higher with smartphones than desktops. This only goes on to show why a responsive website is the best choice for business.
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With two different versions of your website, one for the desktop and another for the mobile, it gets complicated to determine the website analytics like traffic sources, redirections between the sites, conversion paths and funnels. On the contrary, a single responsive site means there is no need to track these data from different reports for an understanding of the website performance. The site analytics tools of search engines are designed to deal with multiple devices and responsive data, allowing for easier monitoring and analysis as a single report.
Adopting a single responsive website means lesser time to create the site and lower maintenance costs compared to having separate desktop and mobile websites. With two separate versions of your website, your development team spends more time and resources on maintenance than they would spend with a single responsive website. The cost of maintenance of a responsive website is lower as there is no need for additional testing and support to run two websites. Instead, the development team can use their time and resources to focus more on other important areas of business.
Besides, having two versions of your website means an increase in possibilities of duplicate content that may lead to lower search engine rankings. To rank both versions, you may need two different SEO strategies and campaigns that would use more time and finance. Instead, a single content will do away with this trouble and expenditure.
In today’s world, social media has become a major tool for businesses to connect with new and existing customers, increase brand awareness, boost leads and sales. Nearly one-third of internet users spend their online time on social medial platforms and the figure is only increasing. A responsive website will only go to increase social media shares of content and boost users engagement and a quicker response rate from marketing campaigns as compared to non-responsive websites. Visitors to a responsive site finds it easy to share embedded links even on smaller screen sizes. Increased shares of social media results in more exposure to new audiences, and a resultant increase in conversion rates. This will definitely have a positive impact on search engine rankings.
To find out if your website is mobile-friendly, Google has a useful tool to test the responsiveness of your site. Click to Test Your Site .
Today, responsive web design is not an option but a critical component of it to stay ahead of the curve in business. With an exponential increase in the sales of smartphones and tablets and increasing trends of consumers towards accessing media-rich apps, responsive design is the key to remaining visible in search engines and better conversion rates to stay ahead of competitors for business success.