Can you remember the compressed version of the desktop site on your phone, where you have to tweak and zoom to see anything? This was probably not a unique experience!

Because of this, back in 2015, Google made changes to the search engine algorithm that now affects a website’s mobile presence as a ranking signal. The mobile name of the date was Mobilegeddon. This alone can justify why responsive design is important!

Simply put, a website needs to be user-friendly in a smartphone.

If it doesn’t, your brand may lose leads and sales.

In fact, 40% of users visit a competitor’s website after a bad mobile experience.

What is a responsive website?

A responsive website changes the layout to offer user-centered experience, especially ideal for mobile viewing.

Design elements of a mobile responsive website are like:

• Readable text without the need for zoom
• Required space for tap targets
• No horizontal scrolling

Did you know that the number of smartphone users globally has crossed 2 billion in 2016?

Websites that are not optimized for all of these smaller screens may experience a drop in their search engine rankings. This means that they are not available online.

That’s true, more than 60% of searches now come from mobile devices.

To ensure that your website offers a handy device-friendly experience (without creating a separate app), consider why responsive design is important as a mobile solution.

Let’s find out why and how in detail.

First of all… What is Hack Mobile Responsive Design and why should you care?

What is responsive web design?

Responsive Web Design (RWD) creates a system for a single site to respond to the size of a user’s device with one URL and one content source. A responsive website has a fluid and flexible layout that adjusts to the size of the screen.

The importance of responsive web design is that it provides an optimized branding experience.

In fact, your website will look great and work well on a desktop (or laptop), a tablet, and a mobile phone browser.

Get this:

In the past, developers have created more than one site to adapt to different screen sizes. With the number of device types on the market today, this seems completely inefficient … right?

Now you can understand why responsive web design is no longer a glamorous trend, but a further shift in the way we think about building websites.

Creating a mobile responsive website is not just another option – it’s a necessity!

Advantages of mobile responsive design

The number one advantage of responsive layout is the guarantee that any user on any device can have the best experience on your website. And, most consistently.

Website responsiveness is also a great way to improve the content on your site, ensuring that people using mobile devices are seeing only the most important information.

With the Google Algorithm Update, a responsive web design enhances visibility on search engines – because it’s mobile-friendly. A site with an impressive mobile experience will appear in none of the above results.

Why Responsive Design Is Important For Business

• Increase access to customers and clients on small devices (tablets and smartphones)
• Consistent experience that can drive lead generation, sales and conversions
• Analysis, tracking and reporting can all be in one place
• Reduced time and cost on site and time content management
• Be ahead of the competition (44% of the Fortune 500 companies aren’t ready for mobile right now!)

Note that there are two more methods to offer a mobile-friendly experience. The first one is called dynamic serving, it uses the same URL, but different HTML and CSS code. The pages identify the device on which they are viewed, and complete the correct code.

The second way is to have a completely different mobile site. When users visit the mobile device, they are redirected to a different mobile-specific URL.

As long as the right steps are taken to fully adapt to mobile users, the most useful method really depends on the situation. Find out what works best for your online presence before you dive into it.

Google accounts for over 5.7 billion searches per day on the web.

Google’s recommended configuration for smartphone-optimized sites is responsive web design.

Google also offers a mobile responsiveness test, so you can see how easily a visitor is able to access your page on a mobile device. All you have to do is enter a page URL and get a score.

SEE ALSO: 11 Reasons Why Having a Mobile Friendly Website is Necessary

How to create a responsive design

There are a number of things to consider when creating a responsive layout. This is a process that requires sorting the content across design systems and devices.

There are three main components to a responsive web design:

• A Fluid grid
• Flexible text and images
• Media questions

I will explain each one further.

A Fluid grid

The grid is an important element in creating a responsive layout.

Now, grids are nothing new.

Web designers have used grids to build websites from the beginning. However, in the past, these grid widths were fixed and did not lend themselves to supporting fluid website layouts.

A fluid grid that is used for a responsive website will ensure that the design is flexible and scalable. The uniform spacing of the elements will be proportional and can accommodate a particular screen-width based on percentage. 

The common screen sizes for responsive web design are:

Large desktop

1220 px and more

Desktop

960 – 1219 px

Tablet (portrait)

768 – 959 px

Mobile (wide)

480 – 767 pixels

Mobile

479 px and less

With a fluid grid, users will have the best experience of any screen they see on your responsive website.

Flexible text and images

The way text is displayed depends on the device on which the user is viewing your site, but it should be readable even if nothing else. On mobile responsive websites, there is an opportunity to increase the font size and line height (the difference between each line of text) for eligibility.

Flexible text and images are arranged in a website layout width, according to the defined content series with CSS (stylesheet). Text regardless of the end user’s device may now be enabled. With flexible containers (inside the grid), text can be wrapped on smaller devices with increasing font size.

Flexible images can be more challenging due to the load on small device browser. But these images can scale, crop, or disappear, depending on what content is needed for the mobile experience.

Media Queries

This is the code that powers the flexibility of layout on responsive websites. The media query determines the CSS to be applied according to the breakpoint of a device (for example, iPhone portrait orientation or iPad landscape orientation, etc.).

Media queries allow multiple layouts of a design that uses the same HTML-coded web page.

* Portrait and Landscape */
@media only screen

and (min-device-width: 320px)
and (max-device-width: 480px)
and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2) {

There are other areas that can help define and improve responsive web design for mobile.

Take a look:

User testing of responsive websites

Information about how users interact with your site is invaluable and worth investing in to create the right experience for them.

There are many ways you can do user testing to make useful feedback possible.

Sites like Peak or UserTesting.com offer user testing for a small fee, or for free. Non-traditional methods such as one-wild testing and card sorting can also undoubtedly help in detecting pain points.

Browser and device testing for responsive design

Ensure that a responsive design layout is compatible with all browse-friendly browsers and maintains the consistency of your user experience and design.

Don’t just rely on dragging the browser in and out to test mobile responsive web design; Try visiting a site on as many physical devices as possible.

You may be wondering what could happen next from one operating system.

Inspiration by responsive websites

As with any design project, look for more responsive websites that drive responsive web design in creative ways.

It can be as easy as thinking about the following questions:

• What websites or apps do you use most often on your mobile phone or other portable devices?
• Why would you prefer a site that might offer such services?
• Do you prefer their desktop experience or mobile experience?

Finding answers to these questions can help you find pain points that you may never see during your daily branding.

Responsive Website Design Examples

One of my favorite sites for looking at the best practices for responsive design on the web is Media Queries. This website is a collection of inspirational websites that are using media queries and responsive web design.

Take a look out at some of these responsive website design examples.

Slack

Stripe

Medium

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The future of responsive design for mobile

We know that Google needs the following optimization elements for an effective mobile-friendly user experience using responsive web design:

• Text that is readable, without zooming
• Content that fits on a device’s screen without the need for horizontal scrolling
• Links and buttons that are quite different, so that it is not difficult to tap
• Reasonable load time for pages
• No use of flash! (I hope many of you are saying, “What is Flash?”)

The rise of mobile devices is just the beginning of a shift to more convenient web usage. It’s important to ensure that your website can be viewed by your users anywhere on any device, as wearable smartwatches become more popular.

Is my website mobile-friendly?

You can easily check if your website is responsive by clicking on Google’s Help Tool.

Take a Google responsive test now to find out where your site is located. Test Your Site

Did you get the green light? Excellent, your website passes Google’s responsive test. You already know why responsive design is important to your website users.

Seeing the big red X? Start moving towards a strategy online strategy that includes a customized experience for mobile users. Remember, changes to Google and responsive design don’t affect tablets at the moment, but with responsive web design, you’ll be ahead of you when you do!

Responsive Design Best Practice

Nowadays your website needs to look good and work well on desktop, tablet, and smartphone browsers. Responsive web design can help achieve this.

This article answers all your queries about “What is responsive design?”

The responsive web design has three main components such as:

• flexible text and images
• fluid grid
• media queries.

Never forget the importance of responsive web design for your business.

Because this helps you to:

• Increase consumer access on all devices
• Maintain a consistent user experience that improves perception
• Consistent analysis, monitoring and reporting
• Reduce the time and cost of managing content on your site
• Compete with other brands in your industry

Google drives 96% of mobile search traffic and recommends responsive design as a best practice.

Because responsive web designs are mobile-friendly, it helps increase visibility on search engines, which means more visitors to your website.

More traffic results in better lead generation added conversions and increased sales – three big reasons you need a responsive web design!

Do you know other reasons why responsive design is important?

Please share with us in the comments below!

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