In the modern-day digital landscape, customers gain information about a business’s products, services, and brand identity. These websites act as an important hub where customers can get access to relevant information. With the increased use of smartphones, laptops, and tablets, it has become extremely important for websites to adapt to various devices. A responsive web design will let a website adapt smoothly to different screen sizes and ensure a smooth experience for the users. In this article, you will learn about the importance of a responsive web design for a website and how it can help them drive success and sales. You can even consult SEO Toronto Experts, who will help you have a web design that is responsive for a user.
What Exactly is a Responsive Design?
According to a renowned web designer named Ethan Marcotte, responsive web design involves three essential elements: fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries. By blending these three elements, you will get a website that is responsive and user-friendly.
Here’s how these three components work:
● Fluid Grids:
These elements divide the website into columns that can scale and align to various screen sizes automatically. This will ensure the layout of the website remains visually attractive and consistent no matter what device it is being used on.
● Flexible Images:
These images resize themselves to fit the containers, which prevents them from distorting the layout of the website. Responsive design adapts these images according to the proportions and ensures they look good and load quickly all the time.
● Media Queries:
These queries are written in CSS script. They allow the websites to identify the device it is being used on and adjust the content accordingly. This will enable the customers to have the finest experience by displaying content optimized for a particular device.
Apart from these elements, you can eliminate the need to design a special mobile website for smartphone users with a responsive design. Its ultimate goal is to avoid unwanted scrolling, resizing, zooming or panning that happens with sites that have not been optimized for various devices. So, instead of designing multiple websites for different screen sizes, you can create a design for just one website that will fit and match any device it’s used on.
Why Do You Need Responsive Website Design for Your Business?
As the modern generation has become a multi-screen society, it is important to have a website that can be viewed across as many devices as possible. It is so because you won’t know what device someone will be using to access your website.
The stats used with respect to responsive websites suggest that it is better to appeal to both mobile and desktop viewers. Nowadays, the number of mobile users is higher than desktop users. This number will further continue to grow as global access to smartphones is continuously increasing.
Furthermore, in 2015, Google declared that mobile-friendliness will be a ranking factor in its search algorithms. This also made many user-friendly websites in case they failed to deliver a good experience to mobile users and viewers. Hence, it is important for your website to be responsive and easy to use for mobile and desktop users.
Here are the benefits of choosing a responsive design for your website:
● Improved User Experience:
With a responsive website, you will be able to provide an intuitive and seamless browsing experience. You can do so by adapting the layout, content, and navigation of a website, which will allow users to get the information they want easily without the need to zoom in or scroll continuously. This will further improve usability and keep visitors on your sites for a long time.
● Optimized Conversations:
You can see an increase in conversions with the help of a user-friendly website. It eliminates barriers and encourages users to make desired decisions. When a user can interact with a website and navigate it without any issues, they will likely make a purchase, fill out a form, and subscribe to a newsletter.
● Improvement in SEO Performance:
As mentioned above, search engines prefer websites that are mobile-friendly. This results in improved visibility in search engines and organic traffic. A responsive website design ensures your website meets Google’s mobile-friendly criteria mentioned earlier, thus becoming extremely important for the search engine optimization of a website. Hence, it will bring a positive impact on its search rankings.
● Time and Cost-Effectiveness:
As mentioned earlier, responsive designs eliminate the need to create desktop and mobile versions, which further reduces the time and expenses incurred in development. With a responsive website, your business can effectively streamline its web development efforts by maintaining one codebase that will be used for various devices.
● Flexibility:
You can make easy and quick changes to your website if you have a responsive design for it. You don’t have to worry about making changes on two or more websites. This kind of flexibility is really beneficial when you want to tweak the website design quickly or fix a typo present on your site. You just have to do it once.
● Easy Management:
Many businesses, especially small-scale ones, don’t have a lot of time to refresh or update the looks or content of their websites. Instead of hiring a designer to handle every element of your website, responsive design lets you make changes by yourself without any difficulty or wasting your time. It will further make it easier for you to manage the other elements of your marketing campaign. Responsive design lowers the stress of managing a business website.
Conclusion
Responsive design has definitely helped many business websites stand out and serve their users in an effective manner. There are many examples like Amazon and Starbucks, who recognized the benefits of a responsive website and were able to drive more conversions and reap the profits. It will help you manage your online business processes easily. Furthermore, it can assist you in making your website user-friendly and interactive, which will further boost your search engine rankings. These reasons make responsive web designs the most important aspect of business websites across the world.
