Do you want to improve your website’s user experience, increase search engine visibility, website traffic, leads, and sales? Adopting the responsive and mobile-first design is your way to go. Let’s learn the importance of responsive and mobile-first design for your business via this blog.
In today’s ever-evolving digital world, people are surrounded by technologies all around. Now, people are not confined to desktops only; they’re constantly adopting laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and other devices for accessing websites, especially mobile phones.
In the last decade, mobile phones have become an essential part of our lives. The rise in smartphone use means the way people access the internet has also evolved from just desktops. Therefore, reaching multiple screens and designing a website that drives leads and sales have become businesses’ first and foremost needs.
With users taking 50 milliseconds to form an opinion about your website and 57% of internet users abandoning the business with a poorly designed website, the website world is changing rapidly. So it becomes crucial for web designers to get away with designing websites for desktop users only and must learn to adapt to multiple devices. Thus, businesses are seeking skilled agencies who can leverage responsive and mobile-first designs for SEO-friendly web development.
Responsive and Mobile-First Website Design: The Concept
Responsive web design is an approach to web development that focuses on building flexible web page elements that respond and adjust to the users’ devices. It makes your web page content easily adapt to different display sizes. The layout automatically changes based on the device screen size, including desktops, laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. The main idea behind responsive design is to have one website with a good user experience across the device landscape.
In layman’s terms, mobile-first design refers to the practice of building your website, keeping mobile as the primary device. Your web page elements and sections are designed for mobile devices first and later for the desktop screens. Since Google has switched to the mobile-first index and mobile-friendly websites, it prefers ranking sites with better user experience; thus, creating a mobile website before a desktop version becomes crucial for businesses.
Responsive vs. Mobile-First Web Design: What’s The Difference?
Like many others, you may also be thinking that the mobile-first approach and responsive website development are alike, but that’s not the case. The main difference is how the agency approaches the website. If we sum up the difference between responsive and mobile-first web design in a sentence. In that case, it will be, “mobile-first is a designer creating UX/UI of the website for mobile devices first and developer coding it for smaller screens before desktop, but a responsive website isn’t always mobile-first.”
The responsive website is reactive – the design moves fluidly to fit devices—most of the time, the desktop version elements break down the page. However, the mobile-first website may have proactive changes to the overall design; it generally makes better use of sliders, tabs, and accordions.
The responsive design has become a traditional approach that increases page length and may make a few sections lengthier. On the other hand, mobile-first is a more modern and intentional design choice centered around understanding how users will interact with mobile devices differently than desktops.
Why is Responsive Web Design Important for Businesses?
Enhanced User Experience
Your users are using various screen resolution devices; thus, you need to ensure that your website responds fluidly to all the display sizes. The main idea behind responsive design is to build a website that will provide an improved user experience across as many devices as possible. A well-built responsive website loads quickly on all devices within the view-port and makes your content appear more accessible.
Increased Conversion Rates
According to McKinsey & Company, a difficult to navigate website loses 61% of visitors, resulting in 40% of people shifting to a competitor’s site. But, if the users experience a positive site-interaction, they are 67% more likely to convert. Thus a responsive website design ensures that your visitors can easily navigate your site using any device, resulting in satisfied users and increased conversions.
Flexible Website
The main components of responsive design include flexible grids and layouts, texts, images, and intelligent use of CSS media queries that make a website more flexible, resulting in a better user experience. When users switch from their desktops to tablets, the website automatically switches to accommodate resolution, image size, and scripting abilities.
Cost-Effective
Responsive web design (RWD) is cost-effective since it manages, supports, and upgrades in a single place only. A responsive website design eliminates your pain in developing separate websites for desktops and mobile phones. It allows you to invest in a single site design that works flawlessly across all the devices, thus helping you save a lot of time and money.
Easy to Manage
The best thing about responsive website development is that you don’t have to manage media and content for two different versions. You don’t need to worry about whether you should link the mobile or desktop site on social media, or the redirected links will reach the right users or not, and other more complex stuff.
Importance of Mobile-First Web Design for Your Business
Google’s Recommendation
According to Google’s recent study, 70% of the websites have gone mobile-first now, and from September 2020, Google has switched to mobile-first indexing for all the websites. This makes it crucial for businesses to go mobile-first. As Google recommends it, businesses can significantly increase the chances of website ranking higher in search engines if they opt for a mobile-first design approach.
Improves Local Search Visibility
The majority of people are now shifting to mobile devices. The searchers are more likely to look for a store nearby on their smartphones now. To deliver an impeccable customer experience, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly results. Adopting a mobile-first web design approach can strengthen your local search visibility and help your online business grow.
SEO Gains
If you want your potential customers to find your website, you need to up your SEO game by boosting your website in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Mobile-first design helps the best with SEO because Google gives preferences to mobile-friendly designed websites. So, if your website is built with a mobile-first web design approach, it is more likely to rank higher in search engines.
Higher Conversions
As mobile phone users are rapidly increasing worldwide, people have started building trust in mobile websites. Businesses are broadly adopting a mobile-first design strategy as web pages optimized for mobile firsts and desktops later can boost conversions and generate better leads. In short, designing a mobile-first website can lead to more profit for your business.
Content-driven and Oriented
Considering the content-first design principle is essential when designing for mobile-first, then desktop because mobile users are different from desktops and look for a more clear and concise content than detailed responses. Thus mobile-first design always needs to be content-driven and oriented, making the user experience a lot simpler.
Easy Navigation
The mobile-first design makes the site look better and more accessible for mobile users to navigate, making them more likely to stay on the site and convert. One tried-and-trusted method is using a hamburger menu while designing the mobile-first website. However, the great mobile-first websites go beyond the hamburger menu and showcase intuitive mobile navigation.
End Words!
Times have changed; the web isn’t now what it was when and how the internet started before. The user interests are also constantly shifting. Before adopting a responsive + mobile-first approach, it becomes crucial for businesses to embrace a user-first strategy and stay abreast of users’ latest needs.
Talking about the best practice, we would say, “design your website with the mobile-first approach and get it coded responsive.”
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!