Your website represents your brands and company initiatives. And often, your website is a tool for lead gathering and sales. This is why it’s super important for your website to be user-friendly and follow SEO best practices, including responsiveness.
Responsiveness is becoming increasingly important now, and it’s no surprise why. With a responsive website, your users will be better able to navigate your site and less likely to leave your page due to navigational issues. It also increases the time spent on your website, hopefully boosting sales and website traffic in the long run.
Here are the ins and outs of website responsive design and why your site needs it.
What is a Responsive Website?
A responsive website is a website that has been coded using practices for responsiveness. A responsive website automatically scales content and elements to the screen’s size, providing the best user experience (UX) possible.
Visitors to a responsive website might not realize they are on one. Instead, they simply see that the elements and content match the screen size used for viewing. This makes it easier for the visitor to navigate the page.
For example, images with a larger pixel width may be automatically scaled down to something more digestible for a mobile phone. It would make no sense for the image to stay extra large, like the size of a computer monitor, when the content is viewed on a smaller device.
Without responsively built into the website, the visitor must do extra work to properly view the page and its content. Additional work is not good for conversions and SEO. The more work your visitors do, the more likely they will navigate away from your page.
What is Responsive Web Design?
Responsive web design refers to how a website is put together on the backend for scalability and responsiveness. This process is different from a responsive website (what the visitor typically sees) because it refers to the methods web developers, web designers, and UX/UI designers have to use for the website to become responsive to the visitor.
The ultimate goal of responsive design is a positive user experience (UX), which means that the users are not having to unnecessarily resize the page, scroll, zoom in or zoom out, or pan across the site. With the proper optimization taken into account on the back end, your visitors will be less frustrated by simply viewing your site and more likely to stay on and interact with your Calls to Actions or Service pages.
Responsive website design is super important now, with many users accessing the internet from their mobile devices. Luckily, with responsive web design methods, coders only need to include scalability code, and the website works for them.
Web designers and developers no longer need to design multiple websites based on screen size. Now, you can create one website that scales up or down automatically based on the different devices it may be viewed on.
Benefits of Responsive Design Websites
Based on the previously mentioned facts, responsive web design is very important. There are many financial reasons why you should consider investing in responsive web design. Read on to learn about the numerous benefits of responsive design websites:
Increased Mobile Traffic
Responsive web design most effectively targets mobile users. As most websites were initially built for computer monitors, mobile users struggled to access websites on their phones because the content was too large or unfit for the smaller screen.
Mobile traffic represents the largest share of traffic for most industries, so having a well-designed responsive website will help capture and keep that traffic.
Better User Experience
A responsive website that perfectly adapts to the screen size is one of the most important UX factors. UX refers to the user experience factors, which refers to the overall experience a person might have with a product, typically a website or application. The better the UX, the more positive the experience, and the easier it is to navigate.
A positive user experience typically lends itself to a better ROI. The easier it is to navigate your website (including faster load times and digestible navigation), the more likely a user will buy your product, hire your services, or engage with your business.
Lower Maintenance Costs
Running a website can get pricy—from regular website maintenance to updates, patches, and improvements. Luckily, maintaining a responsive design website is far more cost-effective than maintaining multiple versions of a website. With a responsive layout, web developers only need to develop one site that can scale to different sizes. This means that less functionality on the back-end is likely to break; there are fewer code lines to go through and fewer things that can go wrong. With a more straightforward, responsive design, you will lower maintenance costs and increase your profits from the website.
Improved SEO
The ability of search engines to read a website is essential. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) best practices become crucial for website design. Search engines like Google crawl and rank websites based on the mobile version, meaning a website needs to be responsively designed for mobile first before it is designed for a larger screen like a monitor.
Traditionally, web design defaulted to larger screens, but there has been a considerable shift in the market since Google transitioned to mobile first indexing back in 2019. Now, mobile-friendly design is rewarded by higher rankings in the SERPs.
Good, responsive websites also attract more natural backlinks, improving your search engine ranking.
Faster Development Timelines
While websites can be designed and developed in as little as four weeks, responsive design speeds up web development timelines. Developing one responsive website is much faster than developing separate desktop and mobile versions.
Therefore, from a project management perspective, responsive web design makes web development faster and clients happier due to the overall product and speed.
Easier Data Analysis
Once again, having only one version of your website makes things far easier. Websites can be connected to Google Analytics and Search Console data for monitoring SEO and organic traffic.
Reviewing only one version of the website is far easier than reviewing and comparing desktop and mobile versions. This makes action items from website data far simpler and easier to execute as well.
Increase Conversions Rates
Finally, we have conversions. Conversion rates, or the ability to convert users to leads through our website, can be drastically improved with a responsive website. As mentioned, the better the user experience, the more likely visitors will engage with your product, service, or brand, increasing your conversion rates.
You want conversion rates high so that your company can continue to improve the relationships with these converters or leads, resulting in higher ROI or lead nurturing campaigns.
Get a Responsive Website With WDK
As you can see, the need for a responsive website and responsive design makes sense. There are clear financial benefits and industry benefits to going this route.
Not only are responsive websites becoming necessary due to the switch to mobile-first SEO by Google, but responsive web design makes your website visitors happier and more likely to engage in your brand. You’ll likely also see an uptick in conversions and ROI with a responsive design, as well as fewer costs on things like website maintenance and web development.
Ready to make your website responsive? At WDK, we understand the importance of responsive design. Reach out to learn how we can drastically improve your website user experience with responsive design.
Additional Resources:
Comments are closed.
