2013 was called the year of responsive design by Mashable. If your website is still not responsive, it’s time to understand why you need to make the switch, and quickly. It is estimated that in the upcoming years, mobile browsing will overtake desktop browsing.
At one point in time, standalone mobile sites were the norm. It meant developing an entirely different website for a mobile device. This required the creation of multiple codes and updates on two sites: one for the desktop, and one for the mobile device. But responsive design is different. It adapts itself to different screen resolutions, regardless of which device you are using (smartphone, tab or desktop, and even those that haven’t been invented yet). In fact, some websites even offer adaptive design, where the website detects the device and its functionality changes accordingly to make the browsing experience smoother. So why should you update your website to make it responsive?
The SEO Advantage
To put it simply, Google gives preference in search engine ranking to websites that have responsive design. Google’s philosophy revolves around optimizing user experience, and this very same philosophy forms the basic premise of responsive design. The easier it is to view your website on any device, the higher it is likely to show up in search results. Moreover, because you have only one consistent URL across different platforms, it becomes easier for search engines to index your website.
The Ease of Updates
We already said it, we’re saying it again. You do not have to update your desktop site AND your mobile site. You have to update only one site that can cater to your consumers across all platforms.
Since you have to update only one website, resources can be spent in creating high-quality content that need not be duplicated across websites of the same domain.
The Cost Efficiency
The cost of updating different websites and correcting information on each every time you find something wrong can be saved; and this saving is larger when your business is largely driven by online traffic.
The Data Consolidation
Google analytics is kind in that it allows you to track traffic on your website from different devices in one spot. With a responsive design, it is easier to analyse this data and use it to enhance your website’s browsing experience. With a non-responsive design, it is very difficult to get a clear picture of the total traffic to your website and where this traffic came from.
The Increase in Sales
Picture this: your customer visits your website on the desktop and is unable to view it for some reason. He decides to just view it from his smartphone because he really wants to book that show or buy that book. But your website makes him zoom in and out of his phone to locate exactly what he wants to, and he gives up and goes to a competitor website that is responsive and user-friendly. In short, a responsive design makes your user less likely to find some other website and ensures that he sticks on as a loyal consumer of yours.
Keeping Up with the Future
Like we said, mobile responsive website design can be viewed on devices that haven’t even featured on the market yet. This means your website is pretty much ready for anything that makes its appearance among the audiences. And this saves you the huge cost of changing your website design every time a new device makes an appearance.
As the number of devices increase in the market, as their consumers make the switch from one device to the other, as they increasingly adopt the browsing-on-the-go culture, and as the number of websites among which you have to stand out increase on a daily basis, it becomes exceedingly essential to adopt responsive design for a website that could be catering to any consumer. Whether he wants to read, to shop, to get a quotation for a particular job, or just locate you so that he can come visit you, the process should be effortless, and the website, easy to use.