What Is A Responsive Web Design And Why Is It Important in 2021?

What Is A Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design is one that is responsive according to the screen size of the device you are using. Website that is flexible and adjust according to various screen sizes. Whether you are using a mobile phone of any size, tablet, laptop, or desktop. The website layout should adjust according to the screen size. 

The aim is to develop a design that doesn’t require unnecessary scrolling, panning, zooming, or resizing for every different device.

If not the case, it can be really hard to navigate these websites. 

With responsive websites, you won’t have to worry about creating different website versions for every screen size. Just one website that is scalable for every screen is enough for every user.

Why Responsive Web Design is Important?

In a world of multi-screen, it is almost impossible to create a different website for every screen size. 

Moreover, it is beneficial if your website is responsive in design, both technically and aesthetically. There are several factors that emphasize why you need a responsive website design. 

So, let’s discuss in detail what are some of these factors that make a responsive website design this important. 

1) Google’s Recommendations

On April 21, 2015, Google announced a new update, known as the mobile-friendly update. 

According to this update, mobile-friendliness is a ranking signal. In fact, Google indexes your mobile version first rather than the desktop version of your website. 

So keeping in mind that, we all understand by now how important mobile-friendliness is to Google. 

Over the past years, since the update has been rolled out many websites have taken huge hits in their rankings and traffic. 

All this because their website wasn’t optimized for the mobile version. 

Taking a step further, Google introduced mobile-first indexing. 

After this update, Google bases ranking and indexing on the mobile version of a website rather than the desktop version. 

Due to all this, it is more important than ever to have a responsive website design. This will help your website rank higher in the search engine results and gain more traffic and sales. 

2) Improved User Experience (UX)

As discussed before the design of your website is the face of your company. User Interface (UI) and  User Experience (UX) is a crucial part for the success of any business. 

Although UX in itself a wide term, generally speaking, what we have in account here is the experience that one has when they visit your website. 

When people like your website they will come back to visit. If not, then you may lose a wide customer base of your business. 

When someone visits your website on their mobile device, and what they experience is slow loading, distorted layout, and uneven picture placement, they will definitely not come back again to your website. 

Many companies spend a lot of money on making their websites ravishing. They pay a lot of designers, ask customers for their opinion, use different customer satisfaction survey Apps and systems for their feedback. 

All this to make your website pleasing and captivating. What they lack is the most basic step. Making it responsive. No matter how appealing your website is, if it’s not responsive it is destined to fail. 

3) SEO Benefits

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is being widely used by companies to give a boost to their business. 

The higher you rank in Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs), the higher chances that your potential customers will find you. 

Being at the top of the SERPs can be the difference between you and your competitors. 

As discussed above, after the implementation of Google’s mobile-first indexing, websites with a responsive web design will rank much higher as opposed to websites that are not. 

Alongside other SEO factors, responsive web design is one of the most important. Many businesses fail because they don’t take into account a large number of mobile users and hence lose potential customers. 

Using a responsive website design is also beneficial as you don’t have to manage different websites for different devices. 

This allows you to focus on a single front rather than multiple. This also reduces the costs of operation as designing different websites and hiring multiple personnel for managing them will cost much more than managing a single website. 

Therefore, by taking all this into account it is safe to say that when designing a website, making it responsive should be the first and foremost task in the whole design process. 

4) Cost-Effectiveness

In any business, the cost is always one of the most important aspects. When running a business your goal is to be as cost-effective as possible. 

Paying extra for developing and maintaining different sites for every device can be an extra toll on your expenses. 

When you create a responsive website design, you save money by eliminating the extra cost of maintaining a different website for mobile and other devices. 

Moreover, you can spend this money on other more pressing concerns hence creating a more viable system. 

When your website is responsive and appealing to the audience your bounce rate will be minimum. This will result in more profit and higher ROI.

5) Ease of management

Most organizations, particularly more modest ones, don’t have a great deal of time to refresh or invigorate the manner in which their site looks. But instead of employing a designer to deal with each part of your site, a responsive design permits you to roll out the improvements yourself, rapidly and without any problem. 

Furthermore, with only one site, different components of your advertising will be a lot simpler to oversee. 

This will save you from the confusion of which version of your website should be linked to your social media. 

Similarly, you will not have to worry about your redirects, whether they are linked to the right version of your website or not. 

All in all, a responsive website design makes it easy to manage your website and all its aspects.