The term “Responsive Design” is quickly becoming a favorite among web designers and marketing teams across the globe and rightfully so.
Responsive website design simply refers to the process of providing users with a fluid and flexible layout that enables websites to legibly fit any screen size. A responsive design will respond and resize itself depending on the screen size of the device being used, be it desktop, laptop, mobile phones, tablets, or any other smart device.
The concept of responsive design came to the forefront back in 2010 after recognizing the rising number of users who used multiple devices to make purchases. Today, over 55% of all purchases are made using mobiles or tablets, thus, reemphasizing the importance of having a responsive website design.
Consider a situation where you are surfing the internet and are looking up the menu of a nearby coffee shop on your smartphone, but the text is way too small to be read properly, and when you zoom out the page, it becomes stretched and illegible. In frustration, you will exit the page and become less likely to buy from that shop. This will count as a major loss to the coffee shop if every user faces the same issue. And in today’s world, experience is king; making it vital to resolve such bad website browsing experiences.
Responsive Design makes it possible for all text to become empirically readable, all images to appear clearly, and display all relevant information in any device.
Benefits of responsive web design
● Ameliorate user experience
A responsive website design makes it possible to provide visitors with a positive and smooth experience, regardless of which device they are using. A website that responds well to changes, scales effectively, and enables access to all menus and buttons, surely tends to make visitors spend more time on it.
● Improved search engine rankings
As Google considers responsive websites in search engine ranking, it becomes imperative for companies to turn to responsive design, to escape the lower ranks.
● The faster loading time of the website
Shortening attention spans and the availability of options makes people avoid using websites that take more than 3-4 seconds to finish loading. Luckily, responsive sites do enable faster loading of web pages and positively impact the visitors.
● High rates of conversion
With improved website experience, visitors tend to spend more time on websites, which leads to better conversion rates.
● Helps in increasing traffic on the website
More than half of the global internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Hence, forming a website that works well on mobile devices will automatically increase the number of your website users and also raise the duration they spend on your site.
● Enables social media sharing
When your website becomes highly responsive, it makes the visitors on the site easily access the embedded share links even on small screens. Thereby increasing the number of social media shares, hence opening the door to increased search demand and improved SEO rankings.
Conclusion
With the advent of latest technologies, being aware of and incorporating these changes in our businesses is a must for our survival.
The companies that miss out on the use of responsive website design end up becoming invisible to the consumers leading to loss of substantial amounts of revenue.
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