Why You Need a Responsive Website

Navigating the online market as a business can be pretty challenging indeed. The landscape evolves constantly, and it’s difficult to keep on top of digital trends whilst attempting to run a business at the same time. Choosing a responsive website design could help alleviate some stress in the complex digital world, regardless of your business industry.

Opting for a responsive website design for your business could have a dramatic impact on the success of your online presence as a brand, a positive effect on your conversion rates and a staggering influence on your success as a business overall.

A responsive website design is a website which adjusts to fit the size of the screen, regardless of which platform you’re viewing the website from. This means that the screen will adjust to fit a mobile screen, a tablet screen or a desktop.

Undeniably, the most important offering from a responsive website design is that it will make your website mobile friendly. Smart Insights claim that a massive 80% of internet users own a smartphone, which means that you risk missing out on a dramatic proportion of your potential audience by not catering for the platform they could be viewing your content from.

In 2015, Google rolled out a mobile friendly algorithm, placing an emphasis on mobile friendly websites in Google search results. Google aimed to cater to their huge increase in mobile users by showing them results which would optimise for their devices, and as such, opting for a responsive website design would help tighten your SEO rankings and consequently increase your organic traffic.  

Another benefit of a responsive website design is that users will have a seamless browsing journey on your site, regardless of which platform they are engaging with your brand from. Whether they’re clicking through on a mobile or a desktop, they will be greeted with your website in a format which caters for their platform. If they are viewing your website from multiple touch points – on their mobile at first and then later by tablet, they will encounter the same shopping, browsing or content experience.

Similarly, offering a unified web presence across multiple platforms allows you to create content which is shareable, which of course is a goal for any business. Where previously companies had opted for separate mobile and desktop websites, this created roadblocks for sharing, meaning content wasn’t rendering the same across different devices.

Opting for a responsive website design may initially appear to be a more costly investment for your brand, but it will save you money in the long run. With two different websites, one for mobile and one for desktop, you will have two separate sites to maintain and update, two separate sets of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to implement accordingly, and two sets of design fees to consider.

As if these arguments weren’t quite enough, opting for a responsive website ensures your brand image and design are consistent across the web, irrespective of platform, and uniform for every user.

Opting for a responsive website design also forces mobile users to be at the forefront of your mind, encouraging you to be more regimented and targeted with your SEO efforts, which of course are vital for any website.

In summary, if you don’t adopt a responsive website design for your business then not only do you risk being left behind in a fast paced digital world and losing out to your competitors, but you also risk losing visitors, customers and conversions by alienating your audience. Making the move to a responsive web design could have a hugely positive impact for your online business regardless of your industry.