Currently, satisfying the users on the internet is a little tricky. People bounce between the devices to access the web from tablets, desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, smartwatches, and even TVs. You must ensure that your website looks equally good on screens of all sizes and shapes for a great user experience. Therefore, it is essential to have a business website with a responsive design.
Although most online traffic comes from mobile, the desktop is still considered a second close to it, and having a responsive web design helps you achieve the best of both sides. It keeps the website’s integrity but adapts to render fittingly according to the specifications of different devices while making it user-friendly. But what is the meaning of responsive web design? Let’s have a look:
What is Responsive Web Design?
Lets’s understand the idea of responsive website design and its working, A responsive web design is a way to create a website that automatically scales its design elements and content to match the screen size on which it is viewed.
A responsive website design aims to take all desktop-specific components into multi-responsive elements. So that the user can ignore the irritating zooming and resizing that occurs on visiting a non-responsive site. The difficulty faced in seamlessly navigating the website results in frustration in your customers, and as a result, they abandon your website.
Moreover, having a responsive website design replaces the requirement to design multiple websites depending on the different devices. Rather than creating a separate website for desktop and mobile audiences, a responsive website design offers the consistent and best experience to all kinds of audiences.
How Responsive website design works?
You have to add some extra code to the existing site to create a responsive website design. It offers performance parameters and instructions to initiate the changes and make the layouts fluid. In this way, the same website version is provided to users on various devices; only the content is rearranged and transformed for better viewability.
If you want to create a responsive website, it is suggested to use the mobile-first approach. It means you must set the original layout to appear good on a small screen. Once done with the design, you must add the meta viewport tag, breakpoints, and CSS media queries to scale it up while viewing on a huge screen device.
However, the WordPress users must be on the safe side, as there is a chance that your theme might be a responsive one. You can review this by checking your website on various devices or simply try Google’s mobile-friendliness test. If your theme is not responsive, you must consider modifying it to an updated version. It will enhance the overall user experience and help you improve your ranking in the organic search engine results.
Here are several relevant reasons to make you make up your mind:
More Social Sharing
It is another one of the essential benefits of responsive website design. If done precisely, a responsive website design can enhance the social shares of your content. The content that includes a responsive social media button makes it simple to share links to your website, even on small screens.
It may improve the credibility and expose your business to a new audience, which results in more traffic and conversions. Simultaneously, social signals can impact the search engine ranking as they will detect the increased search demand and engagement.
Makes your website highly visible
The maximum website traffic generates from the individual website searches. If your site is accessible easily to all the devices and the users can search anything conveniently, you get more lead generations, conversions, and other benefits.
A responsive website improves the website user-friendliness and makes it simple for people to visit your website from different devices and purchase your product. It is specifically helpful for e-commerce businesses as they can witness an increase in sales after upgrading their website design to a responsive design.
Everything gets easy to handle
If you own a single website to perform all the tasks and grab the attention of users of all devices, you can easily continue with all the management tasks. Managing individual websites for PC and mobile users can be a confusing task that takes effort and time.
Moreover, owning different sites for the various devices users will lead to high website costs. So, it seems a preferable option to invest in a single website’s responsiveness rather than paying extra for different sites. A responsive website will be beneficial for you in the future by making it simple to optimize the website and promote it via social media channels.
Simple Website Analytics
When you get two different website versions, you must keep track of two sets of website analytics to know where your audience is coming from and how they engage with the content. It means you need to track multiple signups, thank you pages, funnels, conversion points, and more.
Whereas, with a responsive website design, the website stats gets simplified as you stay on the top of a single data set. But you can still gain insights into which browsers and devices your audience is using, how much time they spend on your website, and where they drop off. There is no requirement to read the data from multiple sites to get a clear picture.
High Conversion Rates
The lower bounce rate and the customer stays for a long time are the initiating steps to improve the visitors’ user experience and build their trust. The improved trust and user experience results in better conversion rates, including the customers booking a call, making a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter. For example, an average smartphone conversion rates are around 64% as compared to the desktop, and it’s simple to notice the importance of a responsive website design.
Faster Website Loading Time
As per the statistics, most people leave those websites that take more time to finish the loading content. But thankfully, the responsive websites tend to load faster irrespective of the device used to access them. Since responsive websites are created using responsive images and fluid grids, it enables faster loading of web pages, positively impacting the duration of your website visitors.
Easier Maintenance
Having an individual mobile and desktop website needs extra support and testing. When you own different versions of your website, the development team has to divide time and resources to manage them effectively. However, with a responsive website, your development team needs to spend less time on website maintenance, and they get more time to concentrate on the other important operations such as content development, marketing, and product development.
Promotes link-sharing among multiple devices
When the user shares a link from your website with other users using another device, such as a smartphone, responsive design immediately allows a mobile user to access the responsive layout of the website. A link to an unresponsive website is no use for a mobile phone user.
Future Scalability and Flexibility
A responsive website design provides the most accessible and easiest way to support the new and latest devices. The screen sizes and shapes may change over time, and no one is aware of how they will appear in the future. If you opt for a responsive website, there is no need to worry about the latest innovations and redesign your website for each new trendy gadget introduced in the market.
Furthermore, responsive websites seem like a liquid. They can scale down or up to best fit the screen on which they are viewed. It means with the evolution of different screen sizes, responsive websites will always be ready to fulfill the new standard and provide an amazing experience.
More sales and visitors
Having a top-grade mobile-friendly website design with a satisfying user experience helps to attract the audience and give them reasons to stick around. Also, the online shopping trend is growing consistently, and around 54% of the global population does their online shopping using a mobile phone. So, if your website is optimized to fulfill their needs and offer a hassle-free mobile experience, there are chances that the customer will purchase your product and revisit it often.
A responsive site not just improves your sales but makes your content more sharable, which leads to more potential clients. These days people spend around 145 minutes a day on social media websites, and most of them browse these platforms via mobile phones. So, an outdated and slow website can damage your reputation and make all these visitors question your reliability.
Cost-Effective
As mentioned in one of the above points, opting for a responsive site instead of a dual website version means you need to maintain and update only one website. It will save your finances and time that you can utilize in making that single version even more efficient and better.
Better User Experience
A responsive website design is strong enough to boost the user experience irrespective of the type of device used by the audience to access your website. If your website is properly optimized, then they load faster in comparison to the standard mobile version.
As per the analysis by Google based on the number of page-loading studies, the delays in loading can impact the customer satisfaction and insists them to leave and never return. The outcomes might be applicable for both unfamiliar and familiar pages. It means a slow-loading website can cost you not just new customers but also the existing ones.
Another reason to consider, user experience design is Core web vital that affects ranking these days. It means when there are multiple pages with a similar type of content that answer the user’s search query, the search engine algorithm will display the results which are better optimized and load faster.
Better SEO
Google rewards responsive websites with higher search engine rankings. It is one of the essential benefits of responsive web design. If you are worried about your website’s SEO strength, then having a responsive website is important. As of April 2015, Google considers the website’s responsiveness as one of the factors that decide your website’s rank in search engine results. If your site is not responsive, the search engine will place it on the lower pages, whereas it will stand out if it qualifies the mobile-friendliness test.
Lower Bounce Rates
Usually, the bounce rate illustrates the ratio of visitors to a specific website who leaves your website after viewing just a single page. As discussed earlier, a responsive website means that the visitors will stay for a long time on your website, which reduces the bounce rate. The audience will be keener to click through and visit other pages on your website and review the things you are offering.
No Duplicate Content
If you have two versions of a website, basically, you are producing duplicate content. As the search engine won’t be aware of the relevant content, both website versions may face lower search engine rankings. There will be a need for two different SEO campaigns and strategies for both versions to make them rank well in the search engine results. It would take more money and time. So, it is better to make a responsive website and avoid Google’s penalty for duplicate content.
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Final words
As you can see, there are various benefits of responsive website designs for businesses. If your website is still not responsive, it is the right time to plan a redesign, and you must begin with a new fluid layout. It is helpful to figure out the important elements of the page and the pages that can be eliminated, and the amount of copy you wish to retain on your website.
Once you have a clear vision and understanding for redesign, you can dive into selecting the best theme for SEO. Then you can implement the techniques to improve the website’s SEO, conversion rate, engagement rate, and more.
