12 Effective Advantages of Responsive Website Design

Ever since the mobile users have been increased the necessity of responsive website design has also increased. To make a website desktop as well as mobile-friendly, we need to make it more responsive.

The first responsive website was made in the year 2002. This website was the first one to adopt a different browser and layout environment. The need for the responsive website started because of the variation in the screen sizes of a desktop.

Different companies designed different sizes of desktops and laptops. Everyone wanted the same experience regardless of the device. Hence, the need for a responsive website was born.

The first concept of responsive web design was introduced by Ethan Marcotte who in an individual developer. He has also authored a book on Responsive website designing.

Since then almost every website that was designed was responsive. Even the websites which were not built based on the responsive design they transferred there platform to the responsive design.

The need for a responsive website has been increased over the years and is still increasing because of the increasing number of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

People now use their phones not just to call but to do other tasks as well such as Browsing, photography, videography, chatting, etc. Smartphones have become an integral part of everyone’s life because they are handier than any other type of device.

Apart from all these necessities, responsive websites have a good number of advantages which we cannot find on a non-responsive website. The features and advantages of responsive websites are such that it can benefit any business in a great way. We’ll also show you how your website and business can benefit from adopting it.

The Core of Responsive Web Design

There are three basic rules or principles that every responsive website has or must have otherwise it might not be considered as a responsive website.

1. Fluid Grids

One of the core elements of a responsive website is fluid grids. As the name suggests, it acts as an aligning element that aligns different parts of the website according to the size of a screen.

Before loading the webpage, Fluid grids analyses the size and type of the screen and then re-arranges the webpage accordingly and finally loads the complete webpage. Various CSS frameworks that are responsive are placed into the fluid grid.

2. Media Queries

Media Queries started their journey in late 2000, but they became a W3C standard in the year 2012. Media Queries are responsible for sending data to the Fluid grids regarding the screen size. The CSS file will only run if the data from media queries are received by the Fluid Grids.

3. Responsive Images and Media

Today’s websites have a lot of images and media files on a webpage which was not there in earlier websites. Hence, a developer must also take care of the height and width of the media files.

More the number of media types higher is the problem for a programmer. Sometimes we also need to add extra padding to the images or any other media files.

img {
max-width: 100%;
height: auto;
}

The positioning of the media files on different screens is also difficult. Once the CSS files are added the media files will change or adjust its size according to the container.

Advantages of Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design can help us improve and increase many things such as Conversion rates, SEO, User Experience and other things.

Apart from these, here are the 12 major benefits of having a responsive web design.

1. User Experience is Improved

A good responsive website leads to a better user experience. Higher the user experience higher are their chances to stay on the website for a long time. If users identify any of the unrealistic gestures on the website such as pinch-zoom or difficult navigation they will not stay on the site for a long time.

If the website is responsive also, the fonts and the images are in the right place, and there is no need to stress out on the major portions of the website then the users will like it, and hence, the conversion will take place.

When user experience increases, the word of mouth marketing also increases.

2. Increase in Mobile Traffic

Since the final quarter of 2017, the increase in mobile users has been 52% on a global scale. As more than half the population of the earth has moved on to mobile devices, there is no chance that the website should not be responsive.

The need for a responsive website also depends on the type of business. First, we should roll out a beta of a responsive website and check if the conversions are increasing or not.

If yes than release the final version of the responsive website and roll it out before we lose more customers.

3. Faster Website Development

Before we had the technology to build responsive web pages we used to develop two websites with separate domain names which could run on mobile devices and the desktop.

But, now there is no need to build two separate websites. All we have to do is add the code of the responsiveness to the main website. Once the code is applied, there is no need to worry about the type of device. The concept of Responsive websites has not only reduced time to market but also reduced the production cost of the website.

4. Easy to Maintain

Earlier when there used to be two separate websites for mobile devices and immobile devices, the maintenance was also huge. It cost us time and money which lead many of the businesses to build only one website for a desktop.

But because of the responsive website design, the maintenance time and cost both have reduced.

5. No Duplicate Content Penalty

One of the biggest disadvantages to the “Two websites system” was that it countered Duplicate content penalty every now-and-then. As both, the websites had the same content but different URLs, search engines would lower the rank of either of the websites.

In short this concept lead to bad SEO. Hence, to avoid bad SEO problem the developer was supposed to add two separate content with the same meaning on the websites.

Creating two separate SEO strategies was a big headache for the company because both of them had equal importance. Now because of the Responsive website design al,l the confusion and headaches have gone away.

6. Simpler Web Analytics

Initially, the creator was supposed to build, maintain and track two separate websites. Today web analytics have gone so intelligent, that we get every minute details such as how many people stared at a particular image of how many times.

And an owner of the website knows that all the data is important to increase conversions. Now, to maintain data at such a small scale for two websites and also make changes according to the change we see on the analytics result is extremely difficult. For a responsive website, we can gather data in a quantifiable way which is easy to explore.

7. Better Website Loading Time

Research shows that a responsive website loads faster compared to a dedicated mobile site in smartphones and Tablets. Because of responsive images and fluid grids, the site loads way faster than it used to load.

Research also tells that if the site loads slower than expected that there are 53% chances that the customer won’t return. Hence, people spend more time on the site which loads faster.

8. Lower Bounce Rates

Bounce rates are reduced when a website becomes responsive. As the loading speed decreases, the customer is going to stay on the website for a long time which will help reduce the bounce rates.

9. Higher Conversion Rates

As mentioned in the above point that lowers the bounce rates, higher are the conversion rates. The man aim of the responsive website is to increase the conversion rate in smartphone users. According to a study, 64% more mobile users choose to open the site on smartphones compared to desktop.

10. Better SEO

As the Responsive website improves the SEO, it will take our website on top of the search engine which also helps in increasing conversion rates and user base.

11. More Social Sharing

The job of marketing a website reduces if the quality of a website is good because the marketing is done by the customer. Word of mouth marketing and Social media sharing increases when we build a responsive website. Click-through rates also increase.

12. Better backlinks

A good SEO can take our website to the list of trusted websites such as Wikipedia. We can achieve good SEO only when we create better backlinks. Better backlinks can be easily created on a website that provides a better user experience. Hence, a responsive website is the best choice for it.

Conclusion

Creating a responsive website is way tougher than creating a simple website but, it is a one-time investment in both time and money because after creating a responsive website we don’t need to worry about anything.