The need for Responsive Web Design is increasing day-by-day as technology is growing, more and more people are accessing the internet through their mobiles. According to research, almost 7 billion mobile users are worldwide. To know about their activities on mobile devices is a matter of concern for marketers. Companies having mobile responsive websites generate more leads as compared to others. This article will give you detailed information about responsive web design. Let’s get started.
What Responsive Web Design is?
Responsive web design refers to the design of a website that has mobile-friendly features, content, and media. A responsive web design changes and adapts to the size of a screen that a visitor may be using like smartphones, desktops, and tablets. It has become a critical aspect of every site or business to build its brand awareness, improve the user experience, attract more visitors, and convert your site visitors into leads. A responsive web design saves valuable time for your business. You cannot build a separate website for each potential device. A responsive design is compatible with every screen for a delightful UX. It is compatible with modern-day devices and those that have not been invented yet.
Why is responsive design important?
A responsive design allows a business to reach a broader, more engaged audience. A design that is not responsive can irritate your visitors or customers and they will never come back to your site. Many kinds of research show that about 90% of your potential customers do not buy from your site due to a poor mobile-friendly experience. 90% is a huge number, meaning that you are losing junk of business.
Benefits:
Let’s explore some benefits.
It helps consumers land your site:
Data shows that almost 63% of people access Google through their mobile devices. You will get a penalty from Google if your site does not have a responsive web design. Google’s mobile-first indexing impacts the ranking of your site. If your site is not mobile responsive, it can bump down in SERPs. The customers of your site may not find your site at all through their mobiles if your site doesn’t have a responsive web design.
It lets your customers stay for a long time on your site:
A recent study shows that the bounce rate of visitors on smartphones is 40% while on tablets, it is 27%. If the loading speed of a web page is less than 5 seconds, this will make 70% longer viewing sessions. Like Google, mobile users expect a quick and high-quality website experience, it can only be achieved through a responsive web design.
Positive brand recognition and trust of consumers:
Data shows that almost 57% of the customers aren’t likely to buy from a site that is poorly designed for smartphones. And almost 50% of customers get disappointed by the poor online presence of a business and think negatively about it. It is a responsive web design that delights online shoppers. Responsive web design encourages online shoppers to recommend your business and they will come back to your site.
How to Make a Responsive Web Design?
You can make a responsive web design of your site using CSS and HTML. But it takes too much of your time. Now some express solutions are available and CMS (Content Management System) is one of them. It is also known as a website builder. A CMS allows building your website without knowing how to code. You can drag and drop features to make your website responsive on all screen sizes. CMS builders make it easy for you to build a site and are available at an affordable price, or even sometimes free. Some common choices of CMS builders to make a responsive web design are as follows.
CMS Hub
It is a fully hosted and fully integrated CMS offered by HubSpot. Through this, you can connect to other HubSpot tools. HubSpot offers marvelous marketing and sales services due to which you can make your visitors and customers feel good. CMS Hub has pre-built themes that you can optimize for smartphones. Thus you can meet the expectations of your visitors and customers in their browsing sessions.
WordPress
The world’s most popular CMS is WordPress. It offers a Gutenberg editor which is the most straightforward website builder. WordPress offers thousands of templates and themes that you can choose according to your choice. Almost every theme offers responsive web design. It is important to note that after setting up a theme for your WordPress site, you can engage and convert the visitors into customers through free forms, live chat, email marketing, and analytics just by adding HubSpot’s WordPress plugin.
Squarespace
If you want to have gorgeous site designs and creative tools, then you should use Squarespace CMS. To build your mobile-optimized site quickly, Squarespace offers 60 templates. Squarespace editor offers a transition from desktop to tablet to smartphone view. It ensures the design of your site seamlessly responds to different devices.
Wix
Wix is a famous CMS offering free and paid website subscriptions. It offers a drag-and-drop editor, free hosting, and security features. Just like Squarespace, Wix also allows you to see the demo look of your site on multiple devices. Wix CMS increases the experience of visitors through its mobile-optimized design.
Best practices
You can easily create a responsive web design using any CMS of your choice, but it cannot provide you with content and media for a mobile-friendly site. This part is up to you. To create a stunning and mobile-friendly website for your visitors and customers, let’s discuss best practices of responsive web design.
CTA buttons
Your prime objective is to convert the visitor of your site into a customer. This could be done by clicking the CTA button like Learn More, Download, or Buy. If the CTA button is not placed at the right place on your web page, a visitor to your site may not be converted into a customer. You should reevaluate the CTA buttons on your smartphone screens to better conversion rates. If your site does not fit into the header, instead of removing it completely, move to the button or include it in your hamburger menu (the Hamburger menu is the three lines in the top corner).
By adding a hamburger menu, the visitors to your site can still see and click the menu. It makes navigation easy. you also need to consider the size of the clickable areas on your site’s mobile version. On desktop, visitors can use the mouse cursor to click the links and buttons on the site while on mobile, they only use fingers to navigate to different parts of your site. The height of clickable elements on a smartphone should be at least 48 pixels. Buttons, form fields, inline links, and menu navigation are included in this category.
Usage of scalable vector graphics
Icons and illustrations on any website should be formatted as scalable vector graphics, also called SVGs. Unlike other media formats (JPGs, PNGs), SVGs can be scaled infinitely. A high-quality browsing experience for users on any device is ensured by this. Site loads faster, core web vitals improve, and ultimately your site ranks higher in SERPs.
Make sure that images scale
Not only icons and illustrations are the media types that change size on different devices, but you also need to scale the images. For example, images on a desktop website may have 1200 pixels, whereas on a mobile site, you may need only 400 pixels. If you use higher-resolution pictures on all devices, it may disturb the core web vitals of your site and Google may penalize your site for poor core web vitals. So this approach is forbidden. For every device, you should consider uploading different image resolutions. This can be done by assigning different “media” tags to specific “source” objects in the code of your site. It is HubSpot that enables automatic image resizing on the content.
Consider typography
Different fonts work well on different screen sizes. A font that looks well on a desktop may seem inappropriate on smartphones. If the visitor of your site cannot read properly the text of your site, he will never purchase from you. So the best advice for typography on responsive web design is as follows:
- 16pt body type for desktop and mobile web content is the rule of thumb.
- Don’t use uber-thin fonts that fade away on smartphones.
- Headings should always be larger than the body and subheading content.
- Contrasting colors for typography are always the best choice. It doesn’t fade into the background colors of your site.
Device features advantage
Your customers definitely can talk to you through their smartphones but can’t through their desktop computers. So for mobile devices, your CTA should be “Call Now” instead of “Chat Now”. Including your mobile number instead of email on the smartphone, the site is better. If you are running a business that has a mobile application, you should prompt the visitors of your site that your site has an app.
Often test your website
It should be your regular practice that you test your site on different devices and browsers. Google’s mobile-friendly test tools give you complete insights into it.
