Mobile Responsive Design: What Is It and Why Is It Important to My Website?

You’ve heard the term mobile responsive web design, but what does it mean for you and your website? Find out everything you need to know here.

How many times do you look at your smartphone in a day? There are more than 2.7 billion smartphone users in the world. They re checking out restaurants, asking questions and shopping from their phone.
The website they see needs to be mobile responsive if it s going to capture their attention. It also helps bring them through the sales funnel.

How your website looks and the experience people have on it are paramount to success in a mobile-dominated market. You have a great looking desktop site, but a mobile search is the norm. It s time to step away from the desktop and focus on a mobile responsive website. Check out why mobile responsive web design is popular and why your site needs it.

The State of Mobile

Before smartphones, people did all their online searching and shopping on a desktop computer. As smartphones became more powerful, they began to edge out desktop search in popularity. Websites like Amazon made it easier to click a button and order online. Google began making mobile search their priority.

Today, mobile is king. Desktop search and shopping are far behind mobile. How well your site looks and operates on mobile is a ranking factor for Google.
Google is rolling out mobile-first indexing. In the past, Google used your desktop website to determine your ranking on search results. Google then separated mobile search from desktop search. It created rankings depending on what device the person was using. The company developed mobile-first indexing. It uses your mobile site to determine search rankings regardless if you’re on a desktop or mobile phone.
Desktop continues to fall behind the mobile.

Mobile Responsive Web Design is more important than ever.

Mobile Responsive Vs. Mobile Adaptive Vs. Mobile Site

What is Mobile Responsive Web Design?

It s a way to optimize how your desktop site looks on tablets and mobile phones, no matter the size. Your desktop website looks great on a larger screen. If you put it on a cell phone screen, the text and pictures are too big and it looks horrible. It s also difficult for users to navigate.

With a mobile responsive design, the website changes to fit the screen. If a person is on a 10-inch tablet, the website changes to fit the tablet size. If it s a 6-inch, 8-inch or whatever size mobile phone, then it fits and optimizes the website for user experience.

The other option is an adaptive website design. Unlike a responsive design, adaptive only changes for specific sizes. So, you have the desktop site, a tablet site, and a mobile phone site. It doesn t matter if the tablet is 11- or 10- inches, it would fit the same. This could lead to user experience and visual issues for some sizes of cell phones and tablets.

A mobile website isn t your desktop site that changes to fit a screen. It’s a separate website with its own design and branding. It usually starts with an m.website.com or ends in a .mobi extension. These were popular when smartphone use first began but fell out of style thanks to the ease Mobile Responsive Web Design.

Google stated it prefers the mobile responsive website since it looks good no matter the size.

Why Mobile Responsive Web Design is the Best Investment

In today s smartphone-dominated world, having a mobile site isn t only an option, but a necessity. A mobile adaptive site is a cheaper alternative. The gains of responsive outweigh the cost savings of adaptive and mobile websites. A responsive website is much less expensive than a new mobile website. You don t have to worry about creating a new design based on a mobile view. It s more expensive than adaptive, but you don t have to worry about sizing issues.

When dealing with both a mobile website and adaptive design, you have to make changes to your original site and the mobile-specific ones. For example, if you add new products to your main website, then you d have to add the same products to a mobile website and various adaptive sizes. With a responsive site, you have to make the changes one time.
Responsive design also works best for user experience. People expect a mobile site to look great and be easy to navigate. If it isn t, then they ll move on to a competitor. Mobile websites and adaptive designs both have problems with user experience depending on the screen size.

Mobile responsive looks and feels great no matter the size.

The final benefit involves search engine optimization. As we mentioned before, Google prefers a mobile responsive website. They ve also made mobile friendliness a ranking factor. This added with mobile first indexing means a well-created website that is mobile friendly and provides great user experience ranks better for various search queries.

How Do You Know if Your Site is Mobile-Friendly?

Some platforms such as WordPress have a natural responsive design. Many other platforms, including most e-commerce platforms, don t come responsive out of the box.
If you re curious to know if your site is mobile-friendly or if your site is optimized, then visit the Google Mobile Friendliness analyzer.Mobile-friendliness also depends on your page load speed. Pages that take longer to load may be lowered in search engine rankings. You can optimize them by compressing images, CSS and JavaScript and removing the old code you no longer use.
Mobile-friendliness is complicated. Make sure you re doing your best to create the best site possible for mobile. That includes a mobile responsive website.

Mobile Will Only Get More Important

You might drag your feet on creating a responsive site, especially if your site was recently updated, but the mobile revolution will only grow. Smartphones get faster and desktop searches plummet more each year.

Make your site mobile responsive and watch your online traffic and sales grow.

For more information on the importance of having a website for your business or mobile responsive design, then feel free to explore our site.