What are the benefits of a responsive website design?

Responsive website design is a way to attract and retain users.

Firstly, everyone uses smartphones to browse the Internet. Secondly, people are still in a hurry.

• Responsive web design makes visitors don’t leave your website.
• It’s more than necessary to serve content in the mobile devices optimized way. It’s because of the first impression matters. People decide whether to stay or abandon your website in a first second of using it.
• Properly implemented responsive, fast loading website can save you lots of money improving conversion to a website.
• Visitors do not have time to wait for your website to load or to manually adjust the size of the screen to fit the mobile device they are working on.
• They check lots of links and bounce off the websites very often. That’s why responsive web design is so important in the reality where mobile devices Internet traffic is higher than those generated from the desktop computers.

On the other hand, Mobile Apps can be better solution for your website or blog:

• you can communicate with users of your app with Push Notifications; that’s way more natural on mobile than emailing smartphone users
• you can engage your community in every place and at any time
• mobile apps increase retention to the content
• advertising - you can monetize your app using Google AdMob or Google AdSense.

I can recommend you an article about responsive web design and mobile apps: Using News Apps is Fun — What Readers Say About PressPad News. You’ll find more info about RWD and real users opinions about using app. I’m sure that this post will help you to decide which solution is better.

Lets see what are the benefits of Responsive Website Designing.

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is an approach of laying-out and coding a website such that the website provides an optimal viewing experience — ease of reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling — across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

Benefits of Responsive Design

1. Super Flexible

Responsive web design sites are fluid, meaning the content moves freely across all screen resolutions and all devices. Both the grids and the images are fluid. Just as a liquid spreads out or draws in to allow its content to fill an allotted space and retain its appearance, responsive web design’s fluidity achieves the same result with website content on a device screen.

2. Excellent User Experience

While, content is king and discover ability of content are foremost success metrics, it is the user experience that enables visitors to consume content on any website through the device of their choice and preference, anytime. Thus, responsive web design is about providing the optimal user experience irrespective of whether they use a desktop computer, a smartphone, a tablet or a smart-TV. Responsive web design accommodates the busy professional during the day and the wide-awake college student needing access to your site anytime. No scrolling or resizing is needed for any visitor to access your website from their favorite device.

3. Cost Effective

The advantages of having a single site that conforms to the need of all devices are significant when compared to having two separate websites. One website costs less than two, and the savings can be substantial. Sites designed solely for mobile device traffic don’t offer the advanced navigational techniques found in traditional websites, and they also require the user to maintain two separate web addresses for your site. This is inconvenient for most people and can cause them to check out the competition’s website. Responsive web design enhances SEO efforts by having all your visitors directed to a single site no matter what they prefer to use as a device.

4. It is Recommended By Google

With 67 percent search market share, when Google speaks, search marketers listen. Google states that responsive web design is its recommended mobile configuration, and even goes so far as to refer to responsive web design as the industry best practice.

This is because responsive design sites have one URL and the same HTML, regardless of device, which makes it easier and more efficient for Google to crawl, index, and organize content. Contrast this with a separate mobile site which has a different URL and different HTML than its desktop counterpart, requiring Google to crawl and index multiple versions of the same site.

5. Very Easy to manage

Having a separate desktop and mobile site requires having separate SEO campaigns. Managing one site and one SEO campaign is far easier than managing two sites and two SEO campaigns. This is a key advantage a responsive website has over a separate mobile site. That being said, there are benefits to having a mobile-specific SEO strategy, such as optimizing for keywords that are more likely to be searched when someone is on their smartphone.

This were the benefits of Responsive Web Design.

Hope this may help you.

Thank you.

If you feel mobile apps are not necessary for your business or they are high investment then it is must to have a responsive website.

Responsive layout are flexible and adjusts according to any screen size automatically.

More than 85% of the users are active on mobile or tabs. So it is very important that navigation is easy on such devices otherwise user would keep scrolling the page left-right to read content or navigate.

And if you have an expert front-end developer then website responsive layout can be modified to look just like a mobile app. You can keep the necessary information available for user and hide others (to some extend), which would make the mobile view (UI) very clean.

The biggest advantage is that you don’t need a separate mobile site.

It is highly recommended by Google. Due to same URL, indexing and content organisation is easy. It helps in SEO (very important) and visibility on search engines is increases.

So basically, responsive design improves browsing experience, improves conversion rate and SEO.

Smartphone and tablet are rapidly increasing nowadays so the importance of mobile-friendly websites concept is also increasing. Because smartphones and tablets have changed the approach towards design and user experience. A decade ago the spread of mobile devices are low so the web browser capability advancement is low. The web designer will be not having any challenge to deal with their website. But now the interacting with website and smartphones is not the same as doing over the last decade. So creating the website with responsive design is becoming crucial.
If SEO is a core component of your digital marketing strategy, having a mobile-friendly website is becoming essential. Mobile sales have already overtaken desktop sales, and mobile Internet usage is predicted to overtake desktop internet usage by 2014.
Responsive Web Design (RWD) is an approach of laying-out and coding a website such that the website provides an optimal viewing experience — ease of reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling — across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).
Advantages of Responsive Design
1. Super Flexible
2. Excellent User Experience
3. Cost Effective
4. It is Recommended By Google
5. Very Easy to manage

The greatest benefit of a responsive website design is achieved by start - up companies where budget for development for online service model or product(s) is low and it is very important to create a product or service to fit market instantly.

Development of mobile applications or APP come with their own burdens like:

• Development Cost of APP
• Time factor in releasing the application or APP from play store
• Certification issues from the platform vendor
• Regular updates and maintenance of the application or APP
• Making technically strong application or APP which runs error-free on variety of mobile devices.

Rather facing the above problems, the responsive web-design solves all of the above problems with one go with single strategy of creating the perfect website application.

It is one of the most important principles of good web-design.

Thanking You

We now live in a mobile-first era and are moving toward a mobile-first index.

That’s because consumers are addicted to smartphone and tablets. And that isn’t changing any time soon.

In this environment, responsive design is no longer an innovation. Instead, it has become a standard component of any SEO plan, regardless of industry.

Don’t Be Unresponsive to Responsive Web Design

The last 12 months have seen the web move forward at an incredible rate. Among the many changes, the inevitable happened. Mobile web browsing overtook desktop as the device of first choice for internet users.

As published in late 2016, we also saw that, of those people who only use one type of device, twice as many are using smartphones over desktop computers.

Neither of these observations would have taken web designers and marketers by surprise. And yet, the slow response of both business and the online industry to the new state of the web is a little baffling.

In spite of the premonitions from the industry as well as published statistics, many still have not responded well to a basic and obvious demand – responsive web design.

According to some, the number of those who have failed to adapt to the demand for a responsive environment is as high as 60 percent.

This should be a cause of concern for businesses (not to mention a strong motivation for web designers who are looking for work!).

Google is built for users – for people who search the web. In a world where those users are accessing the web via mobile devices, Google is acting accordingly. And so, it stands to reason that they are going to favor those sites that meet the needs of Google users.

In short, Google is going to favor websites that are optimized for people using mobile and smartphone devices. Those websites are typically the ones that have incorporated a mobile responsive design.

If you aren’t yet reaping the SEO rewards from upgrading to a mobile responsive design, here are five reasons why you should make your move now.

1. Improved Site Usability

If users can’t easily navigate your website, it’s unlikely they will stick around.

Google recognizes ‘time on page’ as a fundamental indicator of a site’s value for any given query. Responsive web design makes your website much easier for visitors to read and navigate. The result is an improved user experience and typically a greater time on site.

Good usability scores lead to repeat visitors and increased conversions. As noted above, Google is in the business of satisfying user queries.

A mobile responsive web design is fundamental to a positive user experience, and Google is going to reward sites that meet users with such an experience.

Customer experience and site usability can’t be over-emphasized. Businesses and digital marketing agencies must remain vigilant when it comes to conversion and customer experience.

Positive reviews, traffic, and a rise in branded searches – all of which can impact ranking – come as a result of customer experience. And beneath those factors lay the design elements of a website.

Customer journey and customer experience are what makes businesses online succeed and mobile responsive design is the foundation upon which all experience occurs.

Just as important, is the fact that increasing site usability through responsive design not only satisfies users but is typically rewarded by Google with better search engine rankings.

2. Faster Page Speed

Page loading times are an established and known ranking factor.

Every website should be optimized to load as quickly as possible to help the odds of it ranking well in search engine results.

The consistent message from Google over the years has been that fast-loading sites are favored in search results.

That’s just one of many reasons why Google recommends using responsive web design.

Websites that are mobile responsive will ordinarily load faster (especially on mobile and smart devices), resulting in a more positive user experience as well as a likely boost in ranking.

3. Decreased Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is related to time on site. How quickly do your visitors backtrack or leave your website? Google pays attention to user behavior when it comes to entry and exit points for a website.

Google might interpret short dwell time (leaving a site almost as quickly as you came to it) as a signal that the content that the searcher found on your site wasn’t relevant to their needs.

The consequence for the website will be a negative adjustment in their ranking in Google search engine results for that query.

But it’s not only the content that users are interested in. In fact, it could be argued that on many occasions, design outweighs content. The content may be magnificent, but if the design prevents easy comprehension, users will soon leave the site.

A mobile responsive design enables you to not only put up relevant content for use but also display it in a way that is mobile device friendly. It provides a clean, crisp and undistracted environment for users to browse your website.

4. Less Duplicate Content

As intelligent as Google’s algorithms are, it still requires direction from you on which of your website’s content is most important.

Those who have decided to go down the path of a separate mobile site have a difficult time managing duplicate content issues. Using a separate website for your mobile client requires using a separate URL.

The problem is that the content on the desktop and mobile URL is the same, even though the URL is different.

This duplicate content can seriously harm your rankings. If you do not make it clear to Google which content is most vital and ensure that it is the content being indexed, then they will have to decide for you.

The result is almost always lower rankings in search results. (Most separate mobile sites don’t rank well in search engines because they are canonicalized to their desktop counterparts, which is another benefit of responsive: you can focus your SEO on a single site.)

A mobile responsive website deals with duplicate content problems. Write a single URL regardless of the device being used to view the content.

5. Boosted Social Sharing

Responsive web design is built to make social sharing easy for the most dominant demographic online – mobile users.

Although social media can help SEO, social shares won’t have a direct impact on rankings. But it will help you grow an audience.

A bigger audience can mean more traffic and engagement, as well as more search demand for your brand – which will definitely make Google take notice.

A website that is not optimized for mobile and smartphone users is going to have a difficult time in convincing its users to navigate the awkward and poorly designed social sharing buttons that are designed for purely desktop use.

Responsive web design benefits designers, developers, businesses and, most importantly, users in the following ways:

1. More Mobile Traffic

According to a report from SimilarWeb, more than half of traffic to top websites in the U.S. came from mobile devices in 2015. Therefore, it’s increasingly important for companies to have websites that render properly on smaller screens so that users don’t encounter distorted images or experience a sub-optimal site layout. While some businesses still choose to have a separate version of their website for mobile users, responsive design is becoming the norm because it offers greater versatility at lower development costs.

2. Faster Mobile Development at Lower Costs

Making one responsive website takes considerably less time than making a stand-alone mobile application in addition to a standard desktop website. Since time is money, responsive design naturally costs less than the alternative. Even if the initial investment of a responsively designed website does end up comes out to being more expensive than creating two separate websites, you’ll end up saving in the long run due to maintenance costs, special configuration costs, etc of a website that uses two separate versions.

3. Lower Maintenance Needs

Maintaining a separate mobile site requires additional testing and support. In contrast, the process of responsive design uses standardized testing methodologies to ensure optimal layout on every screen. Having separate desktop and mobile sites also necessitates two content strategies, two administrative interfaces and potentially two design teams. Responsive design’s “one size fits all” approach means less headache for developers, business owners, and consumers. Spending less time on maintenance also frees up time to focus on more important things like marketing and content creation.

4. Faster Webpages

Mobile users in particular have short attention spans. Studies show that mobile visitors tend to abandon webpages that take longer than three seconds to finish loading. If a site isn’t optimized for smartphones and tablets, it will also take more time to navigate, which can frustrate customers to a point of no return. Ensuring that your responsive website uses modern performance techniques such as caching and responsive image display will help improve your webpage’s loading speed.

5. Lower Bounce Rates

A responsive and optimized mobile site provides a much better user experience for the visitor. Therefore, it is much more likely that they’ll stick around for a longer period of time and explore different areas of your site. Alternatively, if your site isn’t responsive, it is much harder to keep the visitor engaged and therefore more likely that they’ll bounce.

6. Higher Conversion Rates

Lowering your bounce rate is only half of the battle. Creating a consistent user experience across all devices is key to converting new customers. When users are deciding whether or not to subscribe to a service, they don’t want to be redirected to device-specific websites because the process often takes longer. Having a single secure website that looks professional on all platforms makes users less likely to get frustrated or turn to a competitor.

7. Easier Analytics Reporting

Knowing where traffic is coming from and how users interact with your website is necessary to make informed improvements. Managing multiple versions of a website requires developers to track users’ journeys through multiple conversion paths, funnels, and redirects. Having a single responsive site greatly simplifies the monitoring process. Google Analytics and similar tools now cater to responsive websites by condensing tracking and analytics into a single report so that you can see how your content is performing on different devices.

8. Improved SEO

Responsive web design is becoming as important to search engine optimization as quality content. Stronger backlinks and better bounce rates translate into higher search rankings, but there’s an extra SEO benefit for mobile optimized sites.

Starting April 21, 2015, Google Search will be expanding its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. –Google

Having a single responsive website rather than separate desktop and mobile versions avoids the issue of duplicate content, which can negatively impact your search ranking.

9. Improved Online Browsing Experience

First impressions are everything, so whether someone is visiting a website for the first time from their desktop or their smartphone, you want them to have a consistently positive experience. If visitors must do a lot of zooming, shrinking and pinching their screens during their first visit, they’re likely to give up and try another website.

10. Improved offline browsing experience

Now that many smartphones and tablets are HTML5 enabled, responsive web design benefits users by making it easier to continue viewing content within HTML5 web applications without an internet connection. Learn more about HTML5 Application Cache.Read More Our Official Company Visit Here