What Exactly Is a Responsive Website?
The majority of people spend an avg of 3.3 hours every single day on their smartphones engaging with all kinds of digital media. As a result of this shift in consumer behavior, you can no longer solely focus on improving your desktop website. Your plan of action needs to be improving your mobile website.
What exactly is a mobile responsive website design? A responsive website scales properly to every sized device. With a responsive web design, your website will properly scale for any device no matter the screen size. It will provide an optimized end-user experience for everyone no matter the device they are using.
You will find the image above to be a good example of a fully responsive website.
How a Responsive Website Actually Works:
You will find a typical website to be made up of different sets of files. This includes everything from individual web pages to the home page and more. Each of these files has HTML code within it. Whereas, each web page is styled with files that are known as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). A non-responsive website would have a specific set of files that is always used no matter what device is accessing it. Whereas, one that is responsive would have varying files based on the device that is being used. Therefore, it will scale to the device that is actively being used because it has the requisite files available.
For instance, when someone is using a desktop website, they may see a horizontal navigation menu. Whereas, if someone is using a mobile device, they would access the file that displays a vertical navigation menu (hamburger menu) for optimized small-screen usability.
Reasons Why Having a Responsive Design Is So Important:
There was a point in history where websites were only accessed from a desktop PC. At that time, everyone had a similarly sized monitor. Thus, all websites were designed for the same average visitor. Whereas, you will find a lot of people accessing websites from all different devices with varying screen sizes now. Thus, the expectations have drastically changed. Nowadays, consumers expect that they will have an optimized experience depending on whether they are using a mobile screen or a large screen. They want websites to know and scale appropriately. For instance, iPhone users have trained people to be able to navigate with swipe gestures. Likewise, anyone who is using a mobile device now expects to be able to click on a phone number to be able to call someone. Likewise, they even expect to have a clickable address to get directions.
Any responsive website will take all of this into consideration. It will provide an optimized experience no matter what sized device they are using.
Top Reasons Your Business Needs a Mobile Responsive Website:
There have been recent studies conducted by Google that showcase that every business should have a responsive website. It doesn’t matter if you are a small, medium, or large business. If you want to gain a competitive advantage and maintain a high market share, it’s a must.
Don’t take our word for it, look at these statistics:
– 57% of all users will not recommend a business that has a poorly optimized website for mobile use
– 57% of all traffic in the United States comes from mobile devices
– 69% of all smartphone users are more likely to purchase from companies with optimized sites.
– Consumers now have twice the number of interactions with brands on mobile devices
– 50% of all Business-to-Business search inquiries are done on mobile devices
– 3/4 smartphone owners use mobile to search for things they want and need. Thus, achieving better rankings will increase sales