Responsive Web Design: What It Is and Why It Matters

Responsive Web Design, or RWD, has been gaining steam over the past few years as more and more designers are moving towards the idea of creating websites that work on any device, rather than being mobile-friendly or using separate sites to serve mobile users.

It’s gaining ground fast with developers who are realizing that RWD can give them control over their users’ experiences on all screen sizes and resolutions, saving them time and effort while retaining the best visual presentation for each device. All of it basically comes down to this: RWD just makes sense. With some design work and some code changes, you can make your site look good across all devices – desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets – without having to make multiple designs or leaving out entire classes of users.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of RWD? Why should you take this approach? Find out here!

Google Loves It As of August 2021, over half of all online traffic comes from mobile devices. As a consequence, a large number of businesses are shifting toward mobile-friendly designs to ensure they’re maximizing their return on investment. Among these mobile-friendly brands is Google, which announced it would penalize sites that aren’t mobile-optimized with lower search engine rankings. In other words, as far as Google is concerned, responsive web design is no longer an option — it’s a requirement. This means you’ll have to start prioritizing your website’s responsivity even if you don’t have a mobile strategy for your business yet. You can always build one after optimizing your current site.

• Responsive Web Design Is Easy To Update And Maintain

This is true, especially for design projects that are just getting started. If your site is responsive, it will have an advantage over other sites that are hard to update or maintain because they are built with technology that makes updates harder. With a Static Website Design, you can save time and money on updating your design down the road. This may not matter so much at the beginning of a project, but as time goes on, you will have to update your site more often than you would with another type of web design. You can even do some updates yourself if you learn how to code because these skills will help you through future changes. Using a responsive framework may be easier for you to bring people in to build things out later if necessary.

• It Pays Off In The Long Run

If you have not been living under the rock for, oh, I don’t know, a decade or so, you probably know that mobile is king when it comes to web design. With more and more people using their smartphones to surf online rather than sitting at a desktop computer in front of a 27-inch monitor, responsive web design—which allows sites to adapt automatically to any screen size—is quickly becoming a must-have feature for most companies. In fact, Yahoo discontinued its old site last year because it wasn’t mobile-friendly! It was clear they needed an upgrade if they wanted their customers to stick around.

• Faster Time To Market

RWD lets you create, deploy, and monitor websites across multiple platforms (smartphones, tablets, and computers) without having to make separate versions of your site. This means you can launch your new website quickly across devices. And responsive sites look good on any device—providing customers with a great experience whether they’re viewing it on their phone or desktop computer. Since customers aren’t loading multiple versions of your site to get at your content (and then leaving due to a poor user experience), you can spend less time developing sites that give a positive client experience from beginning to end.

• Increase Sales

Most people will admit that they spend a lot of time on their phones. In some cases, more than on their computers. This is why it’s important to make sure that your website looks good on both phones and desktops or any other platform for that matter. Using responsive web design (RWD) lets you easily provide a great experience to all of your site visitors across all devices, saving you time and money in development costs while helping increase sales. Customize Your Site: Not only do responsive sites work well across devices, but they also allow you to create unique experiences for different groups of users, such as creating a different page or deal for people with certain mobile carriers based on location data from their device.

• Mobile Optimized Sites Are Easy To Maintain

No one wants to deal with multiple sites. When it comes to mobile, responsive design makes sense for your users, as well as your business. Mobile-optimized sites are easy to maintain because you can build just one site that works across devices—and you don’t have to worry about maintaining multiple versions of that site, either. Plus, responsive web design also saves businesses money by decreasing hosting costs, maintenance fees, and development time.

• Increases Customer Satisfaction

According to Google’s Mobile Trends report, mobile searches account for more than 50% of all search queries. With that in mind, it only makes sense that one of your top priorities as a business owner should be to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Thanks to Responsive Web Design (RWD), you no longer have to worry about making multiple versions of your site for each device; rather, you can make one version and let RWD take care of its resizing and reformatting on the fly. This means increased customer satisfaction for your existing customers — but also a whole new wave of prospective customers who can easily find your business on their phones or tablets.

By making your website accessible to users on all platforms, you are increasing your customer satisfaction. With responsive web design, your users won’t be frustrated because they can’t access information on your site. Responsive web design is also beneficial for SEO (search engine optimization) because it enables search engines like Google to index all of your content more easily.

Conclusion

If you’re thinking about your website’s responsive web design but not sure what it is exactly, don’t worry. In short, responsive web design refers to a single website viewed across multiple platforms and devices. The technology creates a single website that automatically resizes itself for optimal viewing on all devices–phones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers. With traditional website development, there was little cross-pollination between desktop computers and mobile phones. And since search engines are much better at reading mobile content than desktop content, designers who know how to make sites responsive can reap big rewards when it comes time for search rankings.