A responsive web design is a must for any business looking for ways to increase sales and drive more visitors to their website.
Most businesses have a website these days. And they’re designed to work just as well on a tablet, smartphone, or desktop. It’s a necessary step when you want to be competitive in a niche market.
The good part is you don’t have to build a website for each platform. All you need is a responsive website. It detects the device you accessed it from and changes or adjusts certain functions to provide the best experience possible.
We’ll tell you more about the 12 major benefits of a responsive web design in this article.
What is a Responsive Website?
A responsive website consists of a web design that adapts to the dimensions of your visitors’ screen. Your goal is to optimize content for your visitors’ devices. Provide them with the best experience, no matter the device they use.
Responsive web design detects the type and size of the screen used to access it, and it responds by adjusting itself. In other words, the visitor doesn’t have to scroll, minimize, maximize, pinch, zoom or pan to be comfortable on your website.
Responsive web design eliminates the need for a separate mobile website. So, instead of creating two websites, one for large screens and one for mobile screens, you can focus on an optimized platform that scales depending on screen size.
Responsive web pages attract mobile and desktop users alike. That’s why it’s important to be viewable everywhere. You can never know where your viewers are coming from.
Last but not least, Google announced that mobile-friendly websites would rank higher in search algorithms. All the more reason to look for a good website development company New York has to offer, if you live in New York and you want a professional company to help you build a responsive website.
Benefits of Responsive Web Design
There are numerous benefits to responsive web design. It can obviously impact your performance, SEO, user experience and other things that can help your business grow.
Here are the 12 benefits to having a responsive website.
Attract a Wider Audience
When viewers feel comfortable, they’ll stay, no matter where they come from. And you have a better chance of them taking an action that’s profitable for your business.
Your visitors come from a variety of devices and screen sizes. It’s important that they feel welcomed. A responsive design accommodates users on mobile, tablet and desktops. So, your business has more reach simply because it adapts to all devices.
Responsive Website – Drive More Mobile Traffic
In order to catch and keep mobile visitors on your website, you need a responsive web design. When images, text or navigation don’t look good on a smaller screen, visitors tend to leave. They may even go to your competition.
According to SimilarWeb, over 50% of traffic to big websites in the USA in 2015 came from mobile screens. Therefore, it’s important for today’s visitors to have responsive websites that scale to the size of the screen.
The viewer shouldn’t see distorted images or have a hard time finding the menu on their phone. A responsive design helps not only with mobile visitors but also with development costs.
Ease in Developing the Website
A single responsive website is less costly than multiple sites for different platforms. And it takes less time to build one, too.
Because it takes less time and fewer resources to make one fluid website, you save money. The initial investment can seem higher than creating two separate websites, of course, but maintenance and other expenses are more manageable.
Lower Maintenance Needs and Costs
Multiple websites for different devices require changes made specifically to each and every one of them. But one responsive website – one that works on all platforms – needs only one set of changes.
Your staff won’t have to split their time between more projects. Instead, they can focus more on other tasks, such as customer service, marketing strategy or content development, among others.
Improved User Experience
A responsive website keeps visitors and improves their experience. Of course, one of the most important aspects of checking the quality of your website is to take into account the time your visitors spend on your site.
If they stay there longer, your website offers the better user experience. If they can’t find the menu or they have to zoom and pinch repeatedly, they can lose their patience and leave.
When your website scales and responds well on any screen size, visitors have no issue browsing around. As a result, their experience will be better, more positive, so they will stay around longer.
In turn, it can lead to them recommending you to other possible visitors and clients for your business.
Faster Response Rates
A responsive website is a site that loads fast on any device. Most importantly, on tablets and smartphones. When a page loads faster, it has a direct impact on the time visitors spend on your website.
As shown in some studies, visitors tend to leave a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. The longer a visitor needs to wait for the website to load, the more frustrated he becomes.
When a website is more responsive and loads fast, it can see better conversion rates because visitors stay longer and are more inclined to spend their time and money there.
Responsive Website – Low Bounce Rates
The bounce rate represents a percentage of visitors who leave after seeing just one website page. With a friendly interface and a responsive website that doesn’t happen as often.
Visitors greeted with a fast and well-thought-out website stay longer, explore more pages and read more. They can respond favorably to your CTAs or even spend their money on your products and services.
High Conversion Rates
As mentioned before, the more time someone spends on a website, the more inclined they can be to take action. With a responsive website, visitors spend more time on pages and have a better experience. You can build trust with them by giving them a professional, user-friendly interface.
That leads to better conversion rates, too. Conversion can mean signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form, booking a call, making a purchase or subscribing.
After all, conversions made from mobile are up 64% compared to desktop rates. More and more people spend time on smaller screens. Considering, it’s not hard to understand why a responsive website is much needed for a business.
No Content Penalties
When you create one website for desktop and another for mobile, you’re basically working twice on the same content. Duplicate content can damage your reach because of search engine algorithms.
Although search engines are growing smarter and smarter by the day, they still have a hard time understanding which web version is more relevant.
When a mobile website and a desktop version have the same content, they can be seen as duplicates. So, they will both show up lower in searches because engines won’t know which version is more relevant.
If you’re lucky enough to have two versions of your website that rank well, you’ll spend more on SEO and marketing strategies. And you’ll invest more in original content.
Build a great responsive website instead. You’ll avoid all of the problems mentioned above.
Improved SEO
Responsive web design is slowly becoming just as important as quality content when it comes to SEO. Many businesses use Search engine optimization to rank higher in Google’s search rankings. The higher you are on the list, the better the chance someone will click on your URL.
Google announced in 2015 that it would take into consideration mobile-optimized websites when ranking a website.
If a website is mobile user-friendly, it ranks higher in searches. And a boost in search engine results means more clicks to your website from any device.
Increase in Social Sharing
Visitors who are happy with what they see can share their experience more. Responsive web design can facilitate sharing through social media buttons.
Even those navigating your website on mobile can press a button or share a link. Shares increase your visibility and credibility. In turn, you get more traffic and, possibly, more conversions.
Social sharing can improve your search engine ranking as well, because search engines quickly notice online engagement.
Better Backlinking
A responsive website is helpful when building backlinks.
Backlinks are used to show search engines when other online publications or websites consider your website a genuine source of information. They are an important part of SEO strategy.
When your website isn’t responsive, other websites will not be eager to link to you. Instead, they’ll be more inclined to link to websites with a good user experience. That makes them look good, too.
Conclusion
As already stated, there are numerous benefits to implementing a responsive website for your business. If your site isn’t up-to-date yet, you can start by planning a redesign with responsiveness in mind.
Recent developments in responsive website design have focused on smaller screens. But it’s also important to keep in mind users prefer larger displays.
Everyone should have the same user experience on the same website in the end. And it’s easier when you work on a responsive website with the right web development team.
Christopher is a digital marketing specialist at Digital Strategy One and a freelance blogger. He is focused on new web tech trends and digital voice distribution across different channels. In his free time Christopher plays drums and Magic: the Gathering.