We cannot stress enough how important it is for today’s businesses to have a responsive website design. Making a website mobile-friendly can solve many problems and be beneficial to your business in more ways than one.

What is a Responsive Website Design?

It’s a method for developing websites that automatically adjust to the size of a smartphone. Responsive web design, in general, enables a website to function as it does on a desktop system as it is on a mobile device. It also means that any type of web content, be it video, images, or sounds remains the same. The design elements in responsive website design include:

• Sufficient space for tap targets
• The text is readable without needing to zoom
• No need for horizontal scrolling

If that’s not enough to convince you how important mobile surfing is, then maybe a couple of facts will give you more insight. In 2016, the number of smartphone users around the world surpassed over 2 billion. If you still need more convincing, then we have put together a list of benefits/reasons why your company needs to have a mobile-friendly website.

Benefits of Owning a Mobile-Friendly Website

More Mobile Users Than Desktop

Since there are more mobile surfers than desktop surfers, it would be a fatal mistake for any business (big or small) to ignore optimizing websites for smaller screens. And since mobile users accumulate over half of the web traffic from around the world, companies that don’t optimize their websites for mobile devices will lose more than half of their audience.

It’s More Cost-Effective

Having separate sites for desktop and mobile users can be expensive. But having responsive design can save you the extra cost as long as you’ll be able to scale your website on any screen imaginable. Initially, it does get relatively more expensive to make responsive websites. But as you go on, you’ll find that there is long-term value in having responsive web design. What’s more, it takes a reduced amount of time to set up a responsive website, and it’s easier to maintain since you’ll only be responsible for one site. Doing this will free up more time on your end to focus on other aspects of your business. You can even offer tailor-made, location-based offers to attract more traffic to your company’s website.

Consistent Engagement

No matter what device you use, responsive websites extend user experience on many other devices than just a desktop. For instance, a user who came across an e-commerce site from their tablet in the morning will continue researching from their smartphone when going off to work and then making the purchase from their office desktop device. It is due to this facility that responsive websites offer an unmitigated and seamless experience. No one would want to do business with a company whose website doesn’t offer fast loading times, quick results, and a better user experience. The idea of having scrolling and zooming eliminated creates a better overall impression for potential customers.

Improves Your SEO Rankings

The one thing that Google loves more than anything else is a fast-loading website that automatically adjusts itself to any screen size. It’s a key driving factor for improving a website’s search page ranking on Google and other search engines. And the higher you rank in search engine results, the better the chances potential customers have in finding your website. The reason why Google and other search engines prefer responsive websites is that they have only one URL and the same HTML, regardless of the device you open them on. Thus, it’s far more accessible and more efficient for Google to index, organize, and crawl content from only one URL.

Faster Loading Times

Responsive sites typically load faster on any device, especially tablets and smartphones. It’s all thanks to responsive images and fluid grids that take relatively less time for a web page to load, impacting a visitor’s duration on your website. Research reveals that over 53% of mobile users will abandon a site if a web page loads for more than 3 seconds. According to the same study, any website that loads fast will encourage users to spend more time on a site and result in enhanced conversion rates.

Improves a User’s Offline Browsing Experience

With HTML5 enabled on tablet and smartphone devices, users can have access to websites even offline. As such, this increases user engagement and improves the overall browsing experience. Content and email newsletters stored in hybrid HTML5 applications will be consumed more on the go, especially during the lack of Wi-Fi connectivity.

Push Down Bounce Rates

Seeing as how responsive websites have quicker loading times, faster navigation, and better user experience, it will invite more interest within visitors to stay on a website instead of bouncing off from websites that aren’t optimized to be responsive. Users will also be more inclined to click through and explore other pages on your website.

Better Backlinks

Responsive websites enable companies to build better backlinks. Backlinks play a crucial role in any kind of SEO strategy as they show Google and other search engines that third-party websites consider your company site to be an essential source of information. Unresponsive websites are highly unlikely to be linked back by other websites. Besides, any website that doesn’t offer any good user experience would make the more established incredible site look bad in the end.

Conclusion

After going through all of that, we hope that you have a better understanding and appreciation for responsive website design. If you have a company that has yet to get off the ground, then utilizing all of the strategies sprinkled throughout this article is the only way to help you gain more traction and visibility.