Gone are the days when content was king. There is no doubt that responsive website design has gained popularity, especially after 2015 when Google announced that their new search algorithm would rank responsive mobile friendly websites higher on search engine result pages. Today, we live in a cross-platform world where different device types like iPhones, smartphones, iPads, tablets, and laptops surround everyone. With the rapid adoption of mobile devices, the web development scenario has changed fundamentally and it is equally important for business owners to focus not only on the content but also the design of their website.
Responsive web design provides a handful of benefits for businesses. It helps business owners to reach out to their potential customers all around the world, on a variety of devices. A responsive website, customizes itself to conform to the criteria of a user’s device, regardless of the model, screen size, specifications or settings. A few of the advantages of using responsive design are:
1. Google Loves Responsive Design
Google publicly promotes the use of responsive web design, as it matches with their high standards of quality content and clear link structure. Responsive web design uses a single URL and the same HTML code; allowing Google to track, index and organize content from websites easily. It uses only CSS to manage a webpage that is displayed on a particular device.
In addition, Google recommends using a responsive web design because a single URL makes it easier for users to interact, link, and share content from a website they like. Additionally, users do not need to rely on a redirection to access an optimized view of their site. This decreases the loading time of a website tremendously.
2. More Traffic From Mobile And Tablet Audience
According to statista, nearly 52% of all global web traffic came from mobile devices in the third quarter of 2017. That is more than half of all Internet traffic. Yes, you heard it right! Many predict that this trend will rise to 63.4% in 2019.
Creating a responsive website takes less time than building a separate mobile application in addition to a standard desktop website. Responsive websites are built to tailor their content accordingly to the size of the screen and graphics, they provide you with the best opportunity to reach a large number of potential customers.
In this way, you can increase your consumer exposure and generate more traffic to your website, increasing your brand awareness and revenue as well.
3. Improve User Experience
A responsive website results in a more enjoyable user experience. If your audience finds it hard to navigate or use the site because of poor quality design or irregular content formats, they will abandon your site. Google states that if a user accesses the mobile version of the website and gets frustrated, there is a 61 percent chance that they will redirect themselves to another website.
However, if your website unfolds and reacts to a change in screen size, visitors can access menus, links, buttons, or forms easily. As a result, the user experience your website provides improves and your visitors spend more time on your website.
4. Cost-Effective And Time Saving
Before the introduction of the responsive web design concept, web developers had to create multiple versions of the same site for different devices. That was a difficult task and took significant efforts during not only the development phase but also when updates were required, because of the duplication of tasks to make updates on each version of the website. Earlier, a mobile version required a separate mobile codebase.
With the evolution of latest technologies, the responsive web design concept was born. Today web developers are able to create a single website that adjusts to all screen sizes, has only one version of source codes, and a single CMS to update web pages. This significantly reduces the time and cost of a project.
5. Better Loading Time With Low Bounce Rate
As we all know, many of us use mobile devices for short spans, and carry out in depth research from our pc’s or laptops. Studies find that a mobile visitor leaves a web page that takes more than three seconds to load.
In this case, an optimized and responsive mobile website offers the visitor a much better user experience. As a result, they are more likely to stay longer and explore different sections of your site. If your site is slow and unresponsive, it is much harder to keep the visitor engaged, therefore, increasing the chance of abandonment. A well-optimized page not only loads fasts, it also keeps users engaged, resulting in lower website bounce rate.
6. Enhance SEO
Another great benefit of Responsive Web Design is an improved search engine ranking of a website. Today, with so much competition on the net, responsive web design is as important as search engine optimization is, for delivering high-quality content.
As of April 2015, Google considers the responsiveness of your website as one of the signals that determine your site’s rank on the search engine results page. Google webmaster trends analyst, Pierre Farr, says that Google prefers websites that use responsive design instead of a mobile template for better SEO.
If your site does not respond well when it is viewed on a mobile, the search engine giant will place your website lower on the results page, and vice versa, if your site passes the mobile device test it would rank higher on the results page.
Conclusion:
As you can see, responsive web design is the trend of today’s marketplace. Creating responsive websites has many benefits for your business. With the rise in the use of smartphones, the responsiveness of the website is crucial if you want to stay ahead of your competitors. If you are planning to make your site responsive on all devices, QualDev – an ecommerce website design company has the expertise to help you achieve this goal. You can also check out the best Web Design Tips to Improve User Experience here.