With smartphone browsing becoming increasingly commonplace, it’s more important than ever for your website to be adaptable on multiple devices.
Enter responsive design.
Responsive design is a web development approach which aims at crafting websites to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience on any device, from desktop computers and laptops, to tablets and mobile phones.
Here are five compelling reasons to make your website mobile responsive.
1. Mobile use is skyrocketing
Research indicates that more and more website traffic comes from mobile users.
80% of internet users use smartphones, and over 20% of Google searches are now performed on a mobile device. This is very likely to become more pervasive still.
Ultimately, not making your website mobile compatible means that you’re missing out on potential customers. It also means running the risk of alienating an entire generation of smartphone users.
Some more persuasive stats, courtesy of a study published by Google:
- 48% of users say they feel frustrated and annoyed when going a website that’s not mobile-friendly.
- 36% said visiting those sites make them feel like they’ve wasted their time.
- 52% said that a poor mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company.
- 48% said that if a site didn’t work well on their smartphones, it made them feel like the company didn’t care about their business.
2. Recommended by Google
In 2015, Google updated its mobile search algorithm to prioritise mobile-friendly sites.
Google prefers responsive design, and ranks mobile-friendly websites highly. Responsive websites will perform better in search rankings because they provide a better, more intuitive user experience than sites that are not mobile-friendly.
If search engine optimisation (SEO) is a key component of your digital marketing strategy, having a mobile-friendly website is becoming indispensable.
3. Better user experience
As mentioned in the previous point, responsive design provides users with a more intuitive, friendly experience on your website.
For example, with responsive design, users don’t need to fiddle about with zooming and shrinking text or images on screen. Instead, all of the content automatically adjusts to the screen of the device.
Responsive design can even respond to a user’s movements – turning your smartphone horizontally or vertically, for example – and still renders a user-friendly look and layout. Ultimately, this makes it easier and more convenient for users to read and navigate on your site.
Responsive design is also faster on mobiles, so users won’t experience slow page loading frustration.
4. Adapts to future devices
One of the most significant benefits of responsive design is that the size of the template is designed based on screen size, not device.
This means that regardless of the size screen on which someone is viewing your site, it will display properly for that screen size.
In the future, as new devices are being used for web browsing (TVs and watches, for example) and technologies continue to evolve, your responsive site will still look great and will adapt accordingly.
5. It will give you an edge
It’s no secret that the marketplace is crowded. Saturated, even. And where that might be a source of frustration for you, it’s fabulous for your target audience, who have a diverse variety of businesses from which to choose.
These days, everyone is time-poor. If a website doesn’t provide the experience visitors have come to expect, they won’t stick around and will soon find a website that’s friendlier to use – probably one that belongs to your competition.
In the same Google-published study we mentioned earlier, 61% of users said that if they didn’t find what they were looking for right away on a mobile site, they’d quickly move onto another site.
Making your website mobile response is an easy way to immediately gain an edge and differentiate your brand.
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