Let’s explore the essential elements of web development with a 6-part series discussion and for starters, responsive design is considered as one of the most important factors in a website’s success.

Responsive design helps solve a lot of problems a website faces — making your website mobile-friendly, increasing the amount of time a user spends on your site and improves the aesthetic looks of your site on both small and large screens.

What is responsive design?

Responsive design is a process or a way to put together a website that automatically adjusts its elements and contents to match the user’s screen size on which the site is being viewed — images are compressed to the right size while maintaining its quality and lessens the visitors’ effort to read content from their mobile devices.

The ultimate goal of having a responsive design is to prevent unnecessary scrolling, panning, or zooming that may happen with websites that have not been optimized to view for different devices. Oftentimes, it can be challenging to navigate through the website pages and may cost you potential customers that may feel frustrated in trying to figure out how to use your site.

Nowadays, due to technological advancement, there is no need to design multiple websites for different screen sizes and just design one that scales up or down to match the device being used by website users.

The importance of investing in a responsive design

We are now living in a multi-screen society and most people prefer using their mobile devices whenever they browse the internet. According to a report from techjury, there are around 3.986 billion active mobile users in January of this year and in 2018, businesses in the US allotted 9.4% of their marketing budget in mobile marketing.

There are about 1.94 billion active websites across the globe as reported by techjury. This is one of the main reasons why it is important to invest in responsive design because it can have an impact on the user’s opinion of your company, products, or services. This stats suggests that it wise to consider both your mobile and desktop users.

Here are some of the benefits of investing in responsive design:

1. Cost-effectiveness

It can be quite expensive to maintain separate websites for your desktop and mobile users — by using a responsive design, you can save a lot of money by eliminating redundant cost of paying for a mobile site and now, you only need to invest in a single website design to appeal to your visitors using different devices.

2. Improved user experience (UX)

UX is considered crucial to a website because you would like your users to like what your site has to offer and you want for them to come back. Imagine if a user visits your website and a page takes forever to load and images don’t have the proper resolution — these factors would make your company or website appear unprofessional which is a definite turnoff. Website speed optimization is one of the most important factors to help you convince people to give your business a chance and eventually, make you stand out from the crowd.

3. Flexibility

Having a responsive design allows you to make immediate changes to your website. You don’t have to worry about making changes on two website designs, making flexibility a huge factor in giving you an advantage when you want to just make some design tweaks or just fix a typographical error on your site.

4. Ease of website management

This applies especially to small businesses because they don’t have the luxury of time to update or refresh the way their website looks. Rather than hiring a website designer to handle all the aspects of your site, responsive design allows you to make the changes yourself — making you save money and time.

5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) gains

SEO is a digital marketing strategy used by almost all businesses across the globe as this helps them take the top spot on search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher your SERPs are, the better the chance of potential customers finding you. Responsive design helps with your SEO efforts by making your website mobile-friendly, boosting you in search engine results.

Conclusion

Responsive design is important in any part of modern website development strategies and it should be part of yours too. Websites that are responsive generally load faster which boosts your SEO ranking and lessens your bounce rate.

If you want to learn more about responsive design, you can download our Web Development ebook.

If you’re looking for help or if you’re ready to invest in a responsive design, talk to one of our web development specialists now!