Starting from the beginning, let’s look at why it is so important to have a responsive website. What are responsive websites? They are websites that can display on different screen sizes without having any issues and look like someone threw a bunch of pictures in a blender. This means that your website will look great on a desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile phone.
The primary purpose of having a responsive website is to give your visitors a consistent experience on your site.
From the perspective of web professionals
More than 1.2 billion people use the web through mobile devices, and a staggering 80% of internet users are on smartphones. By the fourth quarter of 2021, mobile devices used to browse the web stood at 54.4% of global web traffic. Since 2017, it has hovered at the 50% mark but has been consistently higher since 2020.
Statista (a German company specializing in market and consumer data) surveyed South African web traffic in March 2021 and found that 75,43% of users use Mobile devices to surf the internet. With the growth rate of technology and accessibility to mobile devices, that percentile has probably grown quite a bit. This has a significant impact when it comes to having responsive websites.
Some interesting facts when it comes to business and responsive websites:
- The average person spends up to 4 hours on their smartphone every day.
- The amount of web traffic coming from mobile devices alone adds up to 54.4%.
- 80% of top-ranked websites are mobile-friendly.
- 61% of users do not return to a website if it is not responsive.
- Websites that are easier to navigate lead to an 80% increase in sales made by smartphone users.
How a responsive site has positive impacts on your business
A responsive site can have a positive influence on search engine visibility as well as having a mobile-friendly website adds to your site ranking. Which could lead to more visitors to your site. Google has stated, in the past, that responsive websites will index higher on search results and improve SEO on your site.
Before making a responsive website became much more accessible, businesses made two websites. One website was dedicated to mobile platforms, and the second website was for larger screens such as desktops and laptops. This resulted in businesses paying double for basically the same site but two different platforms. Alongside this, they had to pay for maintenance on both these sites making it extremely expensive.
Google provides a service for you to test if your website is responsive. Test your site here
The three main components to making a website responsive
CSS Media Queries
This is one of the main techniques of responsive web design. CSS media queries allow content rendering to adapt to different conditions, such as screen resolution. It allows us to make different layouts for a website depending on the viewport’s size. These queries are used for design and can also resize text, images, and other elements depending on the viewport size.
Flexible Text & Images
The primary purpose of this is to have images stay in a particular ratio when the size of the viewport changes, instead of having massive content on your site and then needing to scroll horizontally. The content will stay in the same ratio on mobile devices as on a desktop. In most of these cases, you would use responsive units of measurement rather than a set width.
A Fluid Grid
A fluid grid separates pages into equal-width columns and places the content of your page according to the column it is supposed to be in. When you use different viewport widths, the columns used in your grid also expand depending on the viewport’s width.
In conclusion, responsive websites have become a significant part of the growing online world and could hugely impact your brand’s online identity. With the demand for new technology and devices growing each day, the need for responsive websites has become more prominent.
