Responsive Web design can assist you to solve various website-linked issues.
It even makes your website mobile-friendly, ameliorates the way it appears on various devices with both small and large screens, and results in enhancement of the amount of time spent by visitors on your website.
Also, it can assist you to ameliorate your search engine rankings.
Here in this article, we have explained the importance of a responsive design and various pros and cons that you should be aware of before you invest in website redesigning.
What is meant by Responsive Design?
Firstly, let us just quickly explain responsive web design & how it functions. Note that through responsive design, one can put together a site for their automatic scale-up of content & element to match up with the screen size where it gets viewed.
This keeps the images from being larger as compared to the screen width, which makes your site mobile-friendly for mobile-based customers.
The major aim of responsive designing is to avoid scrolling, unnecessary resizing, zooming, or panning that may happen with websites that are not optimized for various devices.
Such issues make navigation of the website difficult, which might also cost you potential visitors who get frustrated on coming to your site.
Also, responsive website design replaces previous requirements to design a specific dedicated mobile site for phone users.
Now, in place of designing various sites with differing screen sizes, you can simply design only one site that scales automatically up or down to match up the device where it is viewed on.
Why should you opt for the Responsive Design?
The society we reside in is multi-screen. Owing to this, it is crucial for your website to be viewable throughout various devices as you never know what device someone is using to view your site.
Responsive site statistics suggest that it is a good decision to appeal to both mobile and desktop viewers.
As per stats, the number of mobile viewers now outnumbers the desktop viewers, and note that this number is considered to only increase with rising global smartphone accessibility.
Moreover, in 2015, Google said that mobile-friendliness will be a major ranking parameter in their search engine algorithm.
It meant that the websites that were not mobile-friendly would lose considerable ground in terms of search engine outcomes as they would not be delivering great experiences to their mobile viewers and searchers.
To sum it up, the advantages of opting for a responsive website design for your site include:
- Flexibility
- Cost-effectiveness
- Ameliorated user experience
- Ease of management
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) gains
Let us take a deep dive at every benefit so that you know a little more regarding why you must invest in having a responsive site.
Cost-effectiveness
Maintaining a separate website for your nonmobile and mobile audience can become costly. Just by using a responsive design, one can save a lot of money by cutting down the cost of paying for your mobile website.
You will just need to invest in only one website design to appeal to all your visitors.
Flexibility
Having a responsive design can help make instant changes to your site easily and quickly. You do not require fretting about making the same changes on 2 sites.
The flexibility that you avail is a big benefit when you only look for making quick design fixes or tweaks on your website as you just require doing it once.
Ameliorated User Experience
User experience is important for site owners. You would want your audience to always like your website and also look for it to be simple to browse which actually convinces them to keep coming back.
In case someone comes to your site through mobile and it takes quite long to load or your image does not have any proper resolution then it can make your business look unprofessional.
No one would want to browse through or do business with a company that is unprofessional in appearance.
However, a responsive design offers a better user experience and assists at convincing people & gives your business a chance.
With a responsive design, the need for scrolling and zooming is eliminated, content is viewed quickly and the whole impression that the visitors get is positive.
SEO gains
SEO is a major strategy that is used by several companies to assist boost themselves in the Google search page rankings.
The nearer you get to the top, the better chance you hold to attract potential customers.
Having a responsive design can assist you with SEO as Google gives higher weightage to the sites that cater to mobile-friendly outlooks.
When combined with other SEO-linked factors, a responsive site can assist in giving a huge boost to search engine results.
Ease of management
Most of the companies, particularly the smaller ones do not have much time to refresh or update the manner their site looks.
Instead of hiring a designer for handling each and every aspect of their site, opt for responsive design as it permits you to make quick changes easily.
Moreover, with only 1 site, other components linked with marketing are way simpler to manage.
You will not have to wonder if you require linking your desktop or mobile website on social media updates, or a question whether all your redirect links would work to get the correct audience on your website.
Note that responsive sites take out a lot of stress in regard to managing a company site.
Is there any downside to having a Responsive Site?
Definitely, like other marketing methods or techniques, responsive website design has its own share of drawbacks. The cons linked with responsive web design are:
- Not every website looks good on every device
- As a business, you would want to offer distinct things to distinct customers as per their device usage and it can be sometimes tough on responsive sites
- You can get into issues linked with resized ads or banner advertisements
- It might be tough for you to create your own responsive site that solely is accurate and unique to your brand.
Sanjay Dey