Responsive design can help you solve a lot of problems for your website. It will make your site mobile-friendly, improve the way it looks on devices with large and small screens, and increase visitors’ amount of time on your site. It can also help you improve your rankings in search engines.

Read on to find out why responsive design is so crucial to your company’s website, and also read the responsive design pros and cons you should know about before investing in a redesign.

What Is Responsive Design?

First, here’s a quick explanation of the responsive design and how it works. Essentially, responsive design is a way to put together a website to automatically scale its content and elements to match the device’s screen size. It ensures the image width is not greater than the screen width and prevents visitors on mobile devices from needing extra work to read your content.

The ultimate goal of responsive design is to avoid unnecessary resizing, scrolling, zooming, etc. It is often challenging to navigate these sites, and it may even cost you potential customers who become frustrated with trying to figure out how to do something.

Responsive website design also replaces the previous need to design a dedicated mobile website for smartphone users. Instead of creating multiple websites for different screen sizes, you can develop just one website that scales up or down automatically to match the device’s screen size.

Why Should You Invest In Responsive Design?

We live in a multi-screen society. Because of this, your site needs to be viewable across as many devices as possible because you never know what device someone will be using to view your website.

Responsive website stats suggest that it\’s wise to appeal to desktop and mobile viewers. The number of mobile viewers now outnumbers desktop, and this number will only continue to rise as global smartphone accessibility increases.

Additionally, in early 2015, Google announced that mobile-friendliness would become a ranking factor in its search engine algorithms. In summary, the benefits of choosing a responsive design for your website include:

Cost-effectiveness
Flexibility
Improved user experience
Search engine optimization gains
Ease of management

Let’s take an in-depth look at each one of these five benefits so you can learn a little more about why you should invest in a responsive website.

1. Cost-effectiveness:

Maintaining separate sites for mobile and non-mobile audiences can get expensive. By using responsive design, you can save money by eliminating the cost of paying for a mobile site. You will only need to invest in a single site design to appeal to all visitors and devices.

2. Flexibility:

When you have a website with a responsive design, you can make changes quickly and easily. You do not need to worry about making changes on two websites. This flexibility is a huge advantage when you want to make a quick design tweak or fix a typo on your site—you only have to do it once.

3. Improved user experience:

User experience is crucial to website owners. You want people to like your site, and you want it to be easy to use to convince them to come back. Suppose someone visits your website on a mobile device, and it takes forever to load, or your pictures do not have the proper resolution. In that case, it can make your company appear unprofessional. No one wants to do business with an unprofessional place. But responsive design, which offers a much better user experience, can help convince people to give your company a chance. Because zooming and scrolling will be eliminated, content can be viewed quicker, and visitors’ overall impression will be much more positive.

4. Search engine optimization gains:

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a strategy many companies use to help boost themselves in Google’s search page rankings. The closer you are to the top, the better chance customers will find you. Responsive design can help with SEO because Google, as mentioned, gives preference to mobile-friendly websites. In combination with other SEO factors, responsiveness can help give you a significant boost in search engine results.

5. Ease of management:

Most businesses, especially smaller ones, don’t have much time to update or refresh the way their website looks. But rather than having to hire a designer to handle every aspect of your website, responsive design allows you to make the changes yourself, quickly and easily. Additionally, with just one website, other elements of your marketing will be much easier to manage. You’ll never have to wonder if you should link the mobile or desktop site on a social media update or question whether or not all of your redirect links will be working on getting the visitors to the right website. Responsiveness takes much of the stress out of managing a business website.

Is Responsive Design Overrated?

Of course, no marketing method or design type is perfect, and responsive design is no exception. There are a few cons to responsive design, including:

Not every site looks great on every device.
You may want to offer different things to different users according to their device, which can be difficult on responsive websites.
You could run into problems with resized advertisements or banner ads.
It may be difficult for you to create a responsive website on your own that is unique and accurate to your branding.

Still, there are disadvantages to every design, not just responsiveness. The overwhelming majority of responsive website statistics reinforce that this is the best approach.

For example, 61 percent of mobile users say they will leave your website immediately if they cannot find what they are looking for or if your website won’t load the information. So even despite the drawbacks, responsive design is what the overwhelming majority of Internet users prefer because it makes the mobile browsing process that much easier.

Embrace Responsive Design For Your Website

If responsive website success stories don’t convince you to change this way of designing, then let the cost and time savings persuade you. Responsive design is an integral part of any modern web strategy—and it should be part of yours, too.

If you’re ready to invest in a responsive website, please get in touch with experts at TechSimba to get a free quote to make your website responsive.