4 Benefits of Responsive Web Design

A key design trend for 2020, with over 51% of the world’s web traffic being generated from a mobile device, responsive web design has never been more important.

What exactly is responsive web design?

It’s very simple. Responsive web design is the process of making a website that can adapt to the size of the visitor’s viewpoint. Whether that be on a laptop, a tablet or a mobile phone.

Why is this so important?

Nowadays, people want access to information quickly. They want to find solutions to their problems at the touch of a button. They do not want to have to wait long for a site to load in the correct format or even worse, have to manually resize content in order to be able to read it properly.

That is where the flexibility of responsive web design comes into play, which actively helps a website to respond to a user’s device, resulting in a much better and more effective user experience.

Keep reading to discover more reasons why you need to embrace responsive web design if you want to keep increasing, and retaining, traffic to your site.

Your customers will have a better user experience

Could there be anything more frustrating than having to wait for a website to load?

Especially if you are trying to access some much-needed information on your mobile while you are out and about. Chances are you will either leave the site in search of finding what you need elsewhere, or stick with it, but ultimately come away with a poor online browsing experience that will deter you from visiting the site again.

A responsive website, on the other hand, will offer your customers a consistent and high-quality online experience that should result in them using your site time and time again.

It is also important to ensure that you have a mobile-friendly favicon so that users can recognize and remember your brand when they are searching. Check out the best favicon generators that will ensure your site is remembered and used regularly by your customers.

It is cheaper than the alternative

As a business you need to make your website user-friendly on both a standard desktop and mobile devices. Failure to do so will almost definitely result in you losing customers and possibly even going out of business.

Therefore, you have two options. Either embrace responsive web design or design a stand-alone mobile application as well as your desktop website. Not only can it be more expensive in the short term to have to design two websites, in the long run, you will also have more maintenance and configuration costs.

Not to mention the fact that you could lose valuable customers who would prefer to have one responsive site rather than two separate ones.

Users will spend longer on your site

As briefly mentioned above, people’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. They simply will not wait for your site to load on their mobile device, even if it is only for a matter of seconds. Sad, but true.

Instead, they will head straight to one of your competitors in hope of a faster user experience. Then, not only have you lost a potential sale, but you may even have lost a valuable customer for life.

Ensuring that your website is responsive and optimized for smart phones will lower your bounce rate by encouraging users to spend longer exploring your site and ultimately lead to higher conversion rates.

You will rank higher on Google

If you think that ranking highly on search engines such as Google and Bing is all down to content, then you would be wrong. Of course, having original and high-quality content is important, but so is having a single responsive website.

Why?

Firstly, having separate desktop and mobile sites can lead to issues with duplication, which as you most likely already know, is not good for your search ranking.

Secondly, Google and other popular search engines, want to provide users with the best possible online experience. Therefore, if they have the option between providing a user with a mobile-friendly, responsive website or one that takes an age to load and offers up distorted images, you know which one they are going to pick.