Responsive Website Design Offers More than Just Good User Experience

The shift towards using more than one device to access the Internet and complete web-based tasks is causing businesses that have an online presence to rethink their web design and development approach. Forward-thinking businesses have taken note of this and implemented adequate steps to shape websites to suit the modern mobile usability trends. This is exactly where the concept of ‘responsive’ web design and development has gained traction.

In simple terms, a responsive web design is a design that can adapt itself to different devices (having different screen sizes, orientations and screen resolutions). These include 3.5-inch Smartphones, 4-inch Smartphones, 5-inch Smartphones, 7-inch phablets, 9.7-inch tablets and larger laptop/desktop screens starting from 19 inches and going up to 27 inches. Essentially, this means a single design for multiple devices rather than a separate design targeted to individual devices.

For instance, imagine a fast food joint wants to revamp its website and the pre-revamp user research shows a considerable increase in web traffic coming in via Smartphones. There are two options that the firm can take. The first one is too keep the desktop website unchanged whilst getting a new Smartphone website design developed specifically for mobile devices. The second option which would be a more sensible approach would be to involve a design/development firm having experience in planning and implementing responsive web designs. The responsive design will then adapt to not only desktops and Smartphones but also everything in between including netbooks, laptops, tablets and phablets.

Apart from making the website usable for all sizes and resolutions, responsive designs offer businesses a multitude of SEO, online marketing and long-term website maintenance benefits. Some of these benefits are listed below:

1. Responsive Designs Mean Better Search Rankings

• Mobile-friendliness’ is one of Google’s key search ranking factors and the search giant clearly recommends using responsive website design approach to mobile-only sites. This implies businesses seeking to gain a higher online visibility would largely benefit from adopting the responsive design approach. Another indirect advantage of responsive designs is that search crawlers and robots find it easy to index a single URL (which is the case with responsive technique) as against multiple URLs for device-specific site versions.

2. Smartphone-Friendly Websites Mean Low Bounce Rates

Imagine a local florist who owns a non-responsive website. When the Smartphone users visit the site designed for desktop, they might have an unpleasant experience surfing and ordering flowers. The content will be unreadable; even if it is readable, the user may have to do a lot of horizontal scrolling and zooming in/zooming out. This means the user will look for alternative sites offering a better user experience, properly wrapped content, adaptable menus, optimised images and single column layouts. Eventually, this will result in the user spending more time on the responsive website than on the desktop-only site. The convenience of Smartphone-friendly sites leads to reduced bounce rates, which in turn, helps improve the website’s SEO.

3. Responsive Websites Mean Lower SEO Workload

A responsive website is compatible with multiple devices and hence the SEO team only need to worry about a single site than to plan for different website versions of the same business. This means adopting the Smartphone website design approach results in direct efficiency gains to the online marketing department. In case the online marketing activity is outsourced to an SEO company, this means reduction in online promotion budget.