Responsive web design is used for a type of website that is aimed to adapt easily to different form factors and screen sizes – a responsive website will work effortlessly on smartphones, tablets and desktops alike, and there are many reasons why responsive website design is the way to go forward – below we’ve listed some of the major reasons.
Adapting to changes in the industry is easy
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past few years, you’ll have noticed that there is no standard display sizes anymore. Even Apple are mixing things up a little and releasing new devices with varying display sizes. Soon, smart watches with incredibly small displays will storm the market, and there’s no way of knowing just exactly what else we can expect from the mobile industry.
Trying to adjust typical static websites each time a new form factor is released to the market is both a waste of resources and quite unnecessary. A responsive website design will solve these problems, and will be able to stay on form for any range of different display sizes, making it easy to use on all devices in the present, and future-proofing it for any devices released in the future.
Responsive website design is easier to maintain
As it stands right now, there are three major form factors to take into consideration; desktop, full mobile and tablet. A static desktop website may suit a tablet display, but it’s unlikely to pair well with a smartphone, and this can also be said for mobile websites being displayed on tablets or desktops.
Because of this, going the static website route would require maintaining at least two different websites at once, and perhaps even three if a large number of your website’s visitors are viewing from a tablet device.
With responsive website design, only one website needs to be maintained, and this one website will still work smoothly across all form factors.
Easier on the wallet
Not only is maintaining one responsive website a whole lot easier, but if you’re outsourcing website development, it’s going to be a whole lot cheaper too. Developing and maintaining entirely different websites for each major form factor will cost more than developing a single responsive website.
RWD comes with SEO benefits
There are quite a few reasons why responsive website design can help with SEO. For one, a responsive website design can be hosted from one URL or domain name, instead of having to use separate mobile-dedicated domains or sub-domains for a mobile version of your website. (For example, mobile.geeknaut.com) When using a mobile sub-domain, your mobile search rankings will differ from your main website, creating fragmentation and making it difficult to retain the same strong search rankings for the mobile portion of your website.
There are other SEO benefits to RWD too; a simple domain search on Google can often return different results depending on what platform you are searching from, but if your website is optimized for mobile devices and desktop devices, for example, in the case of a responsive website design, results will often be similar for both platforms.
Google also recently revealed that a mobile optimized website will stand a better chance at ranking higher in a Google search when a user searches from their mobile, which is another reason to route for responsive website design.
Better visitor retention & larger demographic reach
A responsive website design looks nicer, and this simple reason is enough for visitors to want to visit your website again. In the mobile era, everything is super quick; smartphone owners in the city want to be able to access websites and view data quickly, and RWD is a fast route to streamlining content smoothly to your visitors.
Smartphone owners in rural areas may have limited service to search with, resulting in slow mobile download and upload speeds. Having a website that is low on assets and subsequently loads faster can make a huge difference for a large potential rural-based audience out there.
With responsive website design, not only will your website look nicer on mobile devices, but it will load faster, and typically provide information visitors are looking for much faster too.
We are now at a point where the internet is accessible from multiple mediums, and because of this, website owners must learn to adapt their content to different form factors to have a chance at keeping up with their competition. Hopefully from this article you will have learned that responsive website design is so far one of the quickest and easiest way to provide visitors with content across multiple platforms.