Responsive web design is a hot topic nowadays and every company regardless the size and industry is working on their responsive design strategy. Responsive design gives companies opportunity to increase their sales and come closer to their users without significant investments, why, what, how?
Let’s start with the obvious – mobile is a center of our personal lives and our business. It’s ridiculous, but now more people in the world own smartphones than toothbrushes.
Mobile traffic is exploding and of course every company should make their sites accessible and user friendly on the mobile.
According to Google Mobile Research, “Our Mobile Planet”, only 15% of the Internet users are satisfied with the user experience of the mobile web, while the share of the mobile in the Internet traffic grew at the astonishing rate of 163% since 2010.
It’s a mobile era and it’s hard not to be excited about all the possibilities that mobile and responsive design can bring! 40% of people will choose a different search result if the first is not mobile friendly, it means that you have all the chances to be the best in it among all your competitors, capitalize on it, increase customer loyalty, traffic and gain competitive advantage.
Still not convinced? ok, let’s continue, in May 2015, Google announced that more searches take place on mobile devices than on desktop. What does this mean ? It means an increasing number of your target audience will view your website on a small device. That’s why it’s crucial that your website is able to adapt and serve the needs of your users, regardless of what they use : PC, tablet or smartphone. People today expect websites to work on many devices.
WHAT IS RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN
Responsive design is the process of optimizing the layout in a way that all the important information is presented in an optimal viewing way; ease of reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling in any kind of device or screen size. In other words, it ensures that the website is effective and easy to use on any device. This eliminates the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market.
BENEFITS OF RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN
1. COST EFFECTIVE
Responsive website design can drastically cut down on development time and cost. Rather than spending the time and resources building a separate mobile website in addition to your traditional desktop website, the responsive design approach enables you to optimize your business for all the devices with a single website. One website costs less than two, and the savings can be substantial.
2. ENSURES A QUALITY USER EXPERIENCE
Browsing a responsive site with a mobile device you don’t have to waste time with zooming, shrinking, and pinching your screen. The site automatically adjusts to your screen size. The simplified reading and navigation drastically improves the usability of your site. For example, According to Google’s Think Insights on Mobile, there is a 61% chance that users abandon sites that are difficult to use, this means that if they quit you site they will go to your competitor’s site and you may lose the client. Your website is a marketing tool and it’s crucial to optimize it. By providing a quality user experience on all devices, you’re on the right track to keep your visitors satisfied and coming back for more.
3. HIGHER RANKINGS IN GOOGLE SEARCH
In April, 2015 Google officially claimed that responsive design will affect search rankings on mobile devices. Why it is important for Google? Because google’s mission statement is “ to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”Aug 20, 2015 and this is exactly what responsive design offers: clean and user-friendly layout. All those multiple versions of your website that you may design for a tablet and the other for smartphone and have same articles in these different version can be dangerous in terms of content duplication. You are probably aware of Google penalization if you duplicate the content. The benefit of responsive design is that you will only need to optimize your content for one link. The URL structure remains constant for all your devices. With Responsive design you have one URL that is easy to update and optimize your content which in turn optimizes your content for all devices. Whether it’s a Samsung phone, iPad or desktop responsive web design makes it easy for the Googlecrawl, index, and organize content. By providing a single, dynamic version of your website to both desktop and mobile visitors, you make it easier for search engines to understand and serve your content.
Another important reason is loading time; responsive web design helps reduce page load time. Your browser also does not waste precious seconds redirecting to a mobile version. Google has already confirmed that it is using site speed in web search ranking.
What is more, as you may know, link building is one of the top tasks for SEO managers and it’s an ongoing and lengthy process to build links from trustworthy sites and when moving to a responsive design website, you can maintain all the backlinks that your original site has. Responsive web design enhances SEO efforts by having all your visitors directed to a single site no matter what device they prefer to use.
In SEO you need to know and manage a lot of things that are critical for Google, for example bounce rate. Search engines interpret a high bounce rate to mean the content was not relevant to the user and will decrease your site’s rank accordingly. Responsive design still lets you display relevant content the user is looking for. With responsive design, you keep all the social shares to one site, and when a link to your site is shared, it’s easily readable on any device.
All the on-page work; title tags, meta descriptions, etc are saved when using responsive design. If you create a separate site, you’ll have to do the work again and risk something going wrong or missing. 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. Responsive design is critical for SEO.
4. EFFICIENCY
It reduces operational efforts by improving efficiency. One update to the website cascades across all device types, rather than updating separate desktop and mobile websites. If you have multiple versions of your website that you’re tracking in Google analytics think of all the time and money you can save by condensing it all into one report.
5. ON-THE-GO ACESS
With smartphone sales on the rise, people want to be able to visit your website and find what they need easily and fast while they’re “on-the-go” and enjoy this experience rather than freaking out from poor navigation experience.
6. INCREASES SALES AND CONVERSION RATE
Responsive design removes some of the barriers that having multiple sites can present, i.e. in functionality, performance and consistent look and feel. Having a website that looks clean, modern, sleek, and easy to ready creates customer satisfaction and builds trust and trust builds revenue. Your responsive website makes it easier for users to Shop Online. If you’re selling anything on your website, a responsive design makes it super easy and enjoyable for users to browse and shop. Images will properly scale and text descriptions will be easy to read. If users will be bored with zooming and errors, if they find it difficult to shop on your website, they’ll quickly leave in frustration. But if you have a responsive design, users will enjoy this digital brand experience and can find what they want in a nice and quickly way. People are buying online and they are using their tablets and smartphones to make those purchases. To get them even more comfortable in doing so responsive design is a must. To give you some statistics, 62% of companies saw increased sales switching to responsive design.
For example, WebUndies made the switch to responsive, it translated into a 188% increase in revenue. Not only that, but mobile page views jumped 200% with double the transactions originating from smartphones and tablets.
O’Neill Clothing saw one of the most impressive increases after their conversion to mobile-ready. Transactions went up 112.50% on iPhones and 333.33% on Android. Conversions rang in at 65.71% on the iPhone and 407.32% on Android. Total revenue cleared 101.25% on iPhone and 591.42% on Android.
As a marketer I really recommend you to start your marketing efforts with doing your web responsive!
7. TIME-TO MARKET
Critical benefit of adopting a responsive design is that it takes less time than creating an additional stand-alone mobile site. Nowadays you need to adapt to the changing trends fast.
As you can see, the question is not about “to do or not to do”, the question is about “ how to do it” and my next articles will be about this topic. Stay updated, don’t miss it !
