What is Responsive Design and Why Is It important in 2021?
Responsive web design has influenced websites in the last decade and have changed how businesses build their digital presence. A website with responsive design is a website that can adapt to the device it is being accessed from, whether it is a mobile device or a desktop/laptop. The website immediately reconstructs itself to provide an optimum experience for the user, it is well tailored to their device and can offer your site a number of advantages.
Responsive web design was first seen in 2010 and got popular from 2015 and in the past couple of years there have been some amazing updates to continually improve the user experience. In the last five years, digital traffic has increased from mobile compared to desktop and a responsive web design will allow you to get the advantage of both worlds. It sustains the integrity of your website content and adapts it to provide more user friendly options.
What is a Responsive Design?
A responsive design allows a website to adjust to possibly any screen size. It eliminates the need to build and sustain two distinct versions of your website and is quite easy to use on mobile or desktop.
The idea of a responsive website is to adapt to the screen it is viewed on. Due to this, it looks great on a mobile device, iPad or desktop computer. By doing so, a user doesn’t have to endlessly scroll horizontally to view the hidden content on a smartphone screen. The page layouts shift to match the screen size and evolve for better viewing experience of the end user.
How Does Responsive Design Work?
It is important to include some additional code to your current website. It offers instructions and performance variables to activate the changes and make your layouts seamless. This helps to provide the same version of the website to users accessing it on different devices like smartphones and desktop by rearranging the content for a better user experience.
If you are developing a new website then you must take the mobile-first approach and make it responsive. By this, you should aim to set up the original layouts to look spectacular on smaller screens and once it is accomplished, you can add the meta viewport tag, CSS media queries and breakpoints to scale the view to a bigger screen.
If you are developing a WordPress website, there is a possibility that your theme is responsive by default. This can be confirmed by testing the website on various devices or by simply trying Google’s mobile-friendliness test. If you feel that your theme is not responsive then you must consider to update the existing theme to a mobile responsive theme. This will eventually help you to improve the complete user experience on your website and can assist you to improve your search engine rankings.
Improved User Experience
A responsive design significantly improves your user experience whether your visitors are using a mobile, tablet or desktop. Along with that, a responsive website loads much faster than a standard website if it has been optimised correctly. As per Google, page load times can affect the overall satisfaction of visitors and can force them to leave and never return. The results will be shared for both familiar as well as less popular pages. Hence, a slow website can cost you in terms of new website users along with the existing users.
It is always advisable to optimize your website to improve the look and feel of the website and be more engaging for the users and improve the user experience. When users have a positive impact about the website, they are more likely to return and recommend your website to their network. Secondly, Core Web Vitals are impacting the search ranking as well. By this, it means that if there are multiple pages with similar content, the search engine will always show them the results that are optimised and load faster.
Economically Viable
A responsive website is much cheaper than a dual-version website because you just have to build and maintain one single website. This will help you to save a lot of time and money which can be invested in improving the website and take it to the next level.
SEO Campaigns
SEO is easier to implement and update with a responsive website as there is only campaign to be monitored. If you have a dual-website then you will need to invest the time and money to maintain two separate SEO campaigns. A responsive website gives you the opportunity to invest that time and resources in keyword research and give your 100% in improving your search engine rankings.
Enhanced Flexibility
A responsive design provides you the most simplest way to support multiple devices. Screen changes and sizes change over a period of time and you cannot imagine how it will look in the next five years. By using a responsive website, you do not have to think about the next phase as you can tweak your existing website design to match it to the new screen size. Responsive websites can be easily scaled either way to fit the screens they are intended to be viewed on. Compared to traditional websites, responsive websites will always be ready to meet the new standards and still offer an immersive user experience.
Conclusion
Responsive website design enables your website content to flow seamlessly across all devices with changing resolutions and still be able to look good. It is also not necessary to keep different versions of your website for desktop/mobile and it significantly saves your time and money in the long run. A mobile friendly website is a must to attract and retain the users over a period of time. This will give you a new identity and help you look more trustworthy to your customers. Let us know what you think about adopting a responsive website design in 2021? You can also contact Nimblechapps, a website development company to build a responsive website for your business.
Keval Padia is the founder & CEO of Nimblechapps, a fast-growing mobile app development company. The current innovation and updates of the field lures him to express his views and thoughts on certain topics.