What Is Mobile Responsive Design?
In the past, web developers would design a website with a fixed width for desktop. This was perfectly fit for purpose at the time, but as the years went on people started using a whole range of different devices, including different sized laptops, tablets, and most importantly… mobiles! Most people have a smartphone in their pocket all day long. Taking this into account, it isn’t hard to believe that mobile internet usage has actually surpassed desktop!
Because of this change, it soon became apparent that having a fixed screen size was no longer functional for so many people. For people with smaller screens, the user experience was so awful that they could barely read the content. So, websites started becoming mobile responsive!
A mobile responsive website design & build has a design and layout which adjusts to the size of the screen based on the device it is viewed from. This doesn’t just mean that everything shrinks down to fit a smaller screen, it means that each piece of content will automatically adjust to be appropriate for the new screen size. For example, top menus will disappear and just be available as a button in the top, pictures/products will stack on top of each other and blocks of text will change size for easy reading. Certain pictures or elements may even be hidden if they are unnecessary or overbearing on such a small screen.
Why Is It So Important?
Having a mobile responsive website is becoming more important every single day. We are a busy nation who are always on the move, therefore more and more people are using their phone for Google. If you are interested to see what percentage of people are viewing your website from a mobile, you can check in Audiences on your Google Analytics profile. You might be shocked by just how many people are!
User Experience
Being mobile responsive is so important for user experience. Before you even start thinking about the quality of your content or the services you provide, you need to think about the user. How are they going to navigate to your content or learn about your services if they can’t even get past the home page because the user experience is so poor?
The majority of online visitors will actually leave a website if they find it hard to browse. In just two clicks a user could leave your website and land on a competitor, so it is really important to make sure they find exactly what they’re looking for!
Not only do mobile responsive websites improve the navigation for the user, they also enhance trust through a series of positive interactions. I think I can speak for most people when I say that browsing through a website where content is overlapping and I have to zoom out to see the content I need normally leads me to wonder if I can actually trust buying from there.
Investing in a mobile responsive website is likely to result in a higher conversion rate for both of these reasons.
SEO
You may not expect this, but being mobile responsive plays a large part in your SEO rankings. Google considered mobile responsiveness to be so important that they started using it as a crucial ranking factor in their algorithm in 2015. Nowadays, Google actually crawls, indexes and ranks the mobile version of the page before the desktop version! This makes it practically impossible to rank at the top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) unless you are responsive!
The issue with non-responsive websites is normally slow loading speeds and something called Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This means that as the page loads, the pieces of content keep moving around which is very interruptive to the user journey. Ignoring these issues is a sure-fire way to decrease your SEO rankings.
Google places a lot of importance on user experience, so it is willing to reward websites than believe in the same principles by ranking them higher on the SERP!
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Whilst investing in a mobile responsive design might not feel like a priority, it is a great way to improve your user experience and SEO rankings. If you would like to discuss your website design requirements, please get in touch. We would be really happy to discuss what may work for you and your business. Email at [email protected] or call us on 01993 835 117
