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Why a responsive website is important

17 Oct 2014

As more people are being glued to their mobile devices, one thing has become clear: mobile is taking over internet surfing. And it's everything from browsing social media outlets to checking emails and doing some online shopping.

As mobile internet usage is increasing steadily, it's now important that your website is mobile friendly. Maybe this isn't a major concern as you already have a website designed for desktop users and another site for mobile users, but as the time changes and technology moves to another stage, there is a design that can handle both types of users and it's called responsive web design.

A responsive website is a website that has been built so that all of the content, images and structure of the website remains the same on any device. For example, when a user accesses your website on his desktop, he is getting the full view of the website. But when that same user goes to visit the website from his smartphone or tablet, the website will retract to fit on the smaller screen. So, with a responsive website design, you don't have to have worry about having different websites for various devices or making sure that your site runs properly on a mobile device. But there are some other really important reasons why you should make the switch to responsive design for your website.

Mobile usage is increasing

So let's take a step into the outside world, you'll notice a lot of people are glued to their mobile phones. In fact, it seems that just about everyone is attached at the hip to their smartphone.

It's important to keep track of the split between users of mobile and desktop devices visiting your website, maybe you could use the following stats from Smart Insights to convince yourself how much mobile usage has skyrocketed:

More than 48% of Google searches are now being performed on some sort of mobile device;

In 2012, over half of all local searches were done on a mobile device;

25.85% of all emails are opened on mobile phones, with another 10.16% being opened on tablets; and

Out of the 4 billion mobile phones in the world, 1.08 billion are smartphones and 3.05 billion are SMS enabled.

Besides all of the search benefits and making users happy, responsive websites have the ability to increase those coveted conversion rates from all of the mobile users in the world. Why? Well, if a website is not working on mobile or tablet device, users will obviously be unable to convert. And how many people are doing online shopping from a mobile device? There has been research that found 69% of tablet users shopped on their device within the last 30 days. So, when a user has to do more work than needed to complete a conversion, do you think that they will still convert?

And there's a more to it than that. As a responsive website can adjust to any screen, developers have control over how all of those conversion elements will display on mobile and tablet.

The great thing about a responsive website is it gives users a better experience and users don't have to fool around with zooming and shrinking the text or images on screen. Instead, all of the content automatically adjusts to the screen of the device. This is more convenient for users to read and navigate on your site.

Separate SEO campaigns?

Going to SEO, if you have separate desktop and mobile sites, you're going to have to run separate SEO campaigns for each. Wouldn't it just be easier to manage only one SEO campaign and one website? That would make not just your customers happy, but also your team including everyone from developers to content marketing managers. More importantly, responsive design is more cost effective.

So stay ahead of the competition. If more and more users are using their mobile devices to search and make purchases online, you have to cater to that audience by having a mobile-friendly site. In fact, 85% of adults believe that a mobile site must be as good as, if not better than, a desktop site. Stay ahead of your competition and have a site that stands out. It'll make the difference. The chances are that your competitors aren't making use of responsive designs, which means that they are losing out on potential customers. And, that is where you can stay ahead and take those customers away.

Siyanda Cele

About Siyanda Cele

A very creative web developer with 7 years’ commercial experience and a history of successful web builds. Proven ability to do successful technical turnarounds, through both hands-on development and focus on creating robust, well-crafted and elegantly simple solutions. Build pixel perfect web applications. Expertise in React, Redux, Angular. Highly knowledgeable on scalable and usable UI components and Front-end architecture. Solid understanding of React/Angular rendering theory. Skilled in Node.js, Express, ES6, Async Generator, Event-loop. Skilled in JavaScript integration with Grunt/Gulp, Webpack. Great skills of working in flexible Agile environment, familiar to Scrum, Kanban, JIRA, TDD and pair programming.