Importance of Responsive Websites

It is estimated that more than 65% users prefer using mobile friendly websites and responsive websites specifically. In the fast-moving schedule, most of the customers moved on purchasing things from mobile friendly websites. In the last five years, the number of mobile internet users has overtaken the desktop users. Before the rampant use of smartphones and tablets, web designers used to be primarily careful about the same look and feel of the respective websites in various desktop browsers.

When people started accessing certain information on mobile internet, many businesses realised the necessity to harness the large resource of mobile users. Hence, they went for a separate version of their websites, especially for mobile phones. Such versions started with ‘m.xyz’, instead of ‘www’. Later on, it was found that those were difficult for users in order to navigate, slow downloads, and other related problems, ultimately, poor user experience. Eventually, this brought down the functionality and content of the site, which stopped them from accessing the information they were searching for.

Here comes the pertinence of Responsive Web Design (RWD), which is an approach that allows a website to adapt to the screen size irrespective of the devices used. This means the site behaves similarly in a smartphone and a laptop. This has solved the problem of zooming in and out to view the content, and thus facilitates navigation.

Some of the benefits attached to a responsive website are:-

• Such sites perform well in all the existing devices.
• It saves time and money, as they survive longer.
• It functions faster, easier to manage, thus improving the user experience.
• It is apt for SEO, as handling SEO for separate sites- mobile version and desktop version- is difficult.
• As mobile users are increasing, responsive sites expands conversion rate.
• Responsive websites are generally recommended by Google.

As responsive websites have one URL and same HTML, irrespective of the device, it makes easier for Google to crawl and index content. Here, the doctrine is “one website, many devices”, which provides a great user experience. This concept has made it easier for business for dealing with customers using different devices; otherwise, they would have to design different sites according to diverse devices.