The Importance of Responsive Website Design

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There are an infinite number of ways to design a website, but some designs are much more effective than others. Though some WordPress themes may look attractive at first due to a sleek or enticing interface, it may not be your best option. If you choose a theme that doesn’t port well to a mobile device, you are severely limiting the potential of your marketing campaign. In the past websites were designed almost exclusively for desktop computers, but today we need make more of an effort to cater to all types of computing devices – or you could be missing out on a lot of revenue.

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design is a design technique with the goal of optimizing web pages to maximize the ease-of-use for the visitor. Today, people access the Internet from all sorts of devices, including desktops, smartphones, and tablets, and this presents an enormous challenge. Each of these computing devices have different screen sizes, resolutions, and display options. The challenge for website designers is structuring a website in a manner that dynamically adapts to the device that is being used to access content. The goal is to make your website as easy to read and navigate as possible – regardless of the device that the user is using to access your content.

Oh, and guess what? Mobile technologies aren’t showing any signs of slowing down. If anything, the speed at which they are being developed, produced, and refined is only accelerating. As time marches forward, you can expect to see even more innovative mobile solutions that are going to have enhanced displays.

Why Is Responsive Web Design Important?

Why is this so important? The short answer is one word: impatience. It can be absolutely tedious scrolling around a website on your smartphone and constantly needing to resize the images and content in order to read it. Furthermore, poor website designs won’t even display properly on some types of devices, which will aggravate and irritate the user. This is marketing suicide – the goal is to make it extremely quick and easy for a customer to make a purchase. Otherwise, you will scare away your customers and send their business to one of your competitors.

Responsive Designs and Online Marketing

Lacking a responsive design can even hurt your online marketing efforts. This year Google released an update to their search algorithm that incorporates the mobile-friendliness of your website as a ranking signal. All things equal, if your competition has a responsive and mobile friendly website, they will rank higher in the search engine results than you – meaning that they will be able to capture more organic traffic and increase sales. Though we don’t know the inner-workings of the Google algorithm (it is highly protected intellectual property), you would be remiss if you failed to account for this metric in your SEO strategy.

 

The Benefits of a Responsive Website Design

Now that you understand what responsive designs are and why they are so crucial to mobile users, consider the bottom-line benefits:

  • Your website will be protected from future trends and developments in the mobile technology industry.
  • Your pages will load faster for mobile users and be dynamically formatted for their device, which creates a more positive user experience.
  • Responsive designs are very affordable. Though they take a little longer to design, you will save yourself time in the long run from trying to make a non-responsive theme into a responsive theme.
  • You will boost ranking signals to the Google algorithm, which will help your site rank higher and capture more organic traffic.
  • Money! The more users that can use your site effectively and the more organic traffic you capture as a result of a responsive theme or website design will help drive conversions, sales, and ultimately profits!

Seeking Help When You Don’t Know What to Do

If you lack a website with a responsive design and you aren’t sure how to implement this feature, you need to reach out to a web design professional. The problem is that you could be irritating a large percentage of visitors to your site when they try to access it from a mobile device. If your users are irritated and impatient, they are not in a favorable mindset to make a purchase. And let’s not forget, your bounce rate is going to be horrendous. Instead of ignoring the critical of responsive design, reach out to a professional to help you increase your sales.

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