
Why is Responsive Design More Important Than Ever?
Let’s look at some statistics:
- Statista reports that in the first quarter 2021, 54.8% of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones.
- According to Google, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a site on mobile if they had trouble accessing it, and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead.
- In 2017 mobile eCommerce revenue accounted for 50% of total US eCommerce revenue.
- In the last 6 months, 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase using their mobile device.
- 57% of internet users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website.
The usage of mobile devices is expected to grow leading us to one conclusion: mobile matters!
According to HubSpot, 87% of mobile users turn to search engines first to address their needs.
Mobile Websites—Then and Now
Multiple Sites
In the olden days (that would be in the late 2000s), websites were designed for desktops and a different site was presented on mobile devices, which typically meant the mobile experience was subpar.
From the website owner’s perspective, you had two separate sites to update, maintain, and protect. The focus was clearly on the desktop versions with some nod to those early adopters of smartphones. The first iPhone was launched in 2007 and things have clearly changed since then.
Improved Technology
Fast forward to today and multiple sites are a thing of the past. Building a responsive website that shares the same information on both desktop and mobile devices is best practice.
The concept is simple—here’s an illustrative example: Imagine a desktop website with 3 boxes horizontally across the page. On a mobile device, a non-responsive site makes the boxes smaller to fit the screen (and becomes illegible), whereas a responsive website will respond to the device and arrange those boxes so that they stack vertically. Mobile users simply scroll up and down to view.
From a design and development perspective, the responsive design presents some interesting challenges since there are many different phones and tablets on the market, each with its own screen size and aspect ratios. Add in the different browsers used on these devices and, as you can imagine, there are some technical skills and quality control measures required to make it all work seamlessly.
Even decision-makers in the federal government use mobile devices to access information. According to Market Connections’ 2019 Federal Media & Marketing Study, over 75% of federal workers use their mobile devices in the workplace on a regular basis.
Benefits of Responsive Design
User-Friendly Experience on Mobile Devices
Engagement with your website is all about user experience, and responsive technology gives us the opportunity to create a website that automatically modifies (or responds) to the device being used.
The features we can leverage to make that mobile user experience outstanding include:
Selectively Displaying Page Elements (Adaptive Design): Since mobile devices have limited functionality compared to desktops it’s important to consider what a mobile user really wants to see when they pop onto your website. Typically they are looking for specific information and responsive design plus adaptive design enables us to automatically selectively choose what content is displayed based on the device used—desktop or mobile. All those fancy videos and pictures on the desktop may just be a distraction for the mobile user who wants to find the location of your offices while on the go.
Buttons for Fat Fingers: Have you ever poked at a website link on your phone and hit the wrong one? That’s not your fat fingers, that’s poor website design. Responsive technology allows the page content to be reorganized, but it’s the planning and design that determines the user experience. Again the concept is simple—make buttons big enough for fat fingers and don’t put them next to other buttons.
No Longer Too Small to Read: Responsive technology has all but eliminated the too-small-to-read problem associated with older websites. At the end of the day, if visitors can’t read the text, they are going somewhere else—pinching to expand is a thing of the distant past. Responsive technology is part of the solution, but the way websites are designed and built to take advantage of responsive technology is also a big part of the picture. Simple page layouts, icons, and short descriptive headers allow visitors to navigate quickly to more detailed content pages. Detailed content pages are also adopting a much simpler (mobile-friendly) layout to give visitors the information they need now.
Lower Bounce Rates / Higher Conversion Rates: Bounce rate measures the number of visitors that come to your website and leave immediately (or bounce). Lower bounce rates are associated with more engaging websites. Especially for all those mobile users, a well-designed responsive website results in a good user experience, and in turn, people will stay on the site longer. The longer someone is on the site, the more likely they are to complete a form and enter into your sales funnel.
Improves Google Rankings
Google proactively rewards websites that are mobile-friendly. Or look at it from the opposite perspective—penalizes those that are not mobile-friendly.
In 2015 Google announced their mobile-friendly initiative which ranked mobile-friendly websites higher for searches on a mobile device. Skip forward to 2018 and Google introduced mobile-first indexing which ranks your website based on the mobile version of the site before (or instead of) the desktop version. In practice, this means if your site is not mobile-friendly the chances of getting found organically through an online search are extremely low—and that is a game-changer! And if that is not enough, as of July 1, 2019, mobile-first indexing was enabled by default for all new websites.
Mobile-friendly is now well established as one of the foundation stones for search engine optimization and is referenced as such on Google’s 2021 update called Core Web Vitals.
Competitive Edge
The most basic of benchmarks is often overlooked—have you looked at your competition lately? A responsive website is already the industry standard and is defining who wins the online battle for client attention. The first companies in your industry to make the switch get a leg up. Conversely, you might find you are already behind the curve and need to go responsive just to level the playing field. Make sure you check it out.
Responsive Website Design is Now Critical
If we haven’t convinced you already that responsive design isn’t a nice-to-have, but an absolute necessity, let’s take another look at those staggering statistics:
- According to Google, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a site on mobile if they had trouble accessing it, and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead.
- In 2017 mobile eCommerce revenue accounted for 50% of total US eCommerce revenue.
- In the last 6 months, 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase using their mobile device.
- 57% of internet users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website.
What’s Next?
If you are unsure about what to do next we are offering a FREE website assessment—we’ll let you know where you stand today and what your options are moving forward.
Ocean 5 Builds Outstanding Websites for Business
Ocean 5 creates websites that are fully custom, technically advanced, responsive (mobile-friendly), professionally designed, and provide an outstanding user experience. We use Growth Driven Design to build a digital platform for