As more and more people use their mobile to browse the net, responsive design has become a key factor in determining whether a user stays on a page or closes it. Content that fails to load to fit the screen size or displays distorted images leads to a poor customer experience making a visitor leave the website for good. Most people may not know this but the time a user spends on a site impacts the search engine ranking of the website. Consequently, it becomes crucial that a page loads properly, and the easiest way to get it done across devices and screen sizes is through a responsive layout.
Let us look at some of the benefits of adopting a mobile-optimised responsive design for your website(s) in this note.
Low Maintenance
With a responsive layout, you do not have to worry about how your website content will appear on different screens. All you need to do is ensure that the design and development team knows what you want. Most professional designers and developers would have already planned to build it in a way that will allow it to seamlessly adapt the content to the screen. Use a content writing services business to get content that will respond automatically. Images and text sizes will become smaller or larger aligning for a better look. All this translates to low maintenance from your end once the site is up and running.
Fast Loading Time
A responsive layout makes your website load fast on any type of screen and as mentioned above, makes your content look great. If you are working with a firm providing digital marketing services, you already know how crucial loading time is for websites. This takes us to the next point.
Low Bounce Rate
Research shows people wait for only 3 seconds before leaving a slow site. This means that no matter how strong your SEO is, if your site does not load fast and adjusts near-instantaneously to the visitor’s screen, you will not be able to retain your website traffic. Moreover, this will affect your search rankings. The content must adapt in real-time without any visible lag to the visitor and for that, a responsive design is the way to go.
Reduced Costs and Effort
There are two ways to ensure your web pages render flawlessly across all screens – (1) you create and maintain a separate website for mobile phones along with your primary website or (2) you choose a responsive design that works across all screens. Considering the cost and effort required, it is advisable to choose the second option since you will not have to create, maintain and track a separate website that has been built only for mobiles.
Rise of Social Media and Instant Messengers
The number of users accessing social media and messengers through their apps will continue to increase in the future. This means a larger number of people will open shared links on their phones rather than on desktops or laptops. Your link as such should be able to render seamlessly on the small screen. And for this responsive is the way to go.
Good for SEO
Search engines give higher priority to sites that are mobile-friendly. Agreed that quality content writing for websites should be your top agenda, but once you have the content in place or at least a content writer, SEO should be what you focus on. Additionally, Google has already started a mobile-indexing strategy and mobile SEO is going to be the next big thing. Having a responsive site puts you two steps ahead of the competition – first because you have good content already on the site and second because your site is responsive and does not need any more optimisation to be mobile friendly.
User Experience
It is likely that your website is the first thing potential customers, partners, users, future employees, et al will see about you. Giving them a wow experience will help your business increase its brand reputation and value. This makes it imperative that you opt for a responsive design that adapts to screen sizes.
This post originally appeared on our earlier website: ihusresearch.com