Is responsive website development is necessary?
Today in store is important information that all entrepreneurs of the Internet Age need to be appraised of.
One statistic has it that mobile users now outpace desktop users. This is expected to further shoot up with a global upsurge in the consumption of smart phones, predicts the Mobile marketing statistics compilation by Smart Insights, an online learning, publishing and marketing advice platform.
From the perspective of a web developer, this implies that a website that is not responsive – in other words promises the same experience to a user as the desktop – will soon become totally ineffective, as most people would be accessing the web via their handsets.
Giving a functional definition of ‘responsive web design,’ Ashok Sharma in 7 Reasons Why Responsive Web Design Matters written for Dzone, a global online community and knowledge publisher for software developers, says “Responsive web design is simply a technique for developing websites in a manner that all of the website content, images, and structure remain the same on any device.”
What this implies is that a website that runs flawlessly on each and every device available in the market – mobiles, desktops and tablets is a responsive site. Below is the timeline linking this information with some interesting sound bites.
Year 2002
Audi’s website was the first that ‘automatically’ adjusted itself to diverse browser settings, reveals The First Responsive Design Website: Audi (circa 2002) by Jim Kalbach, the Head of Customer Experience at MURAL.
Year 2010
The term, ‘responsive web design’ was however formally given by Ethan Marcotte, a freelance web developer in his book, simply called, Responsive Web Design, informs Brenda Barron in 12 Important Advantages of Responsive Web Design for Envato, an online marketplace for creative assets and people.
Year 2015
Forecasting extensive mobile usage over the coming years, Google set the ball rolling with a small modification in its search engine systems. The search giant made mobile presence of a website – a key influencer into upping its rank. To commemorate that ‘historic incident’ 9th of March is now remembered as the ‘Mobilegeddon’.
Sonia Gregory for Fresh Sparks, a branding agency simplifies the concept further in Why Responsive Design is Important and Google Approved – “Responsive web design (RWD) creates a system for a single site to react to the size of a user’s device—with one URL and one content source.”
Briefly, RWD is an unavoidable requirement from the technical perspective, as per the standards set-up by Google. Let’s then look into the various components of a responsive web design from the Google standpoint. This might convince you into hiring a responsive website development company at the earliest.
Let’s start with some number-crunching on responsive web design development:
- 40% of users shift to a competition’s website if they encounter a bad mobile experience. Google’s Mobile Playbook
- More than 60% online searches spring out from a mobile device. – The Next Web
- 57% of users will not endorse a business which has an off the mark website design. – socPub
- Two times more user engagement with brands over a mobile as compared to any other place, store walk-ins, TV and all other connectors. – Google 2017
- Three in four smartphone holders go for a mobile search first to cater their immediate requirements – Google, 2017
Google Also Says!
SEO Clicks!
In case your website is not responsive, Google will play it down on the results’ page. Converse is also true. It will play it up on search results, if its mobile-friendly. The reason for this is simple – along with content that adjusts itself to the device it is being accessed from, responsive web design enables better SEO. Meaning solid backlinks and improved spring ups render high search ranks, says Cody Arsenault in 10 Essential Benefits of Responsive Web Design to CDN penned for Key CDN, a content delivery network management company.
Mobile First!
In 2018, Google announced that it was migrating websites that used the smartest techniques in mobile-first indexing. Earlier, Google crawled and indexed the desktop form of a website, but as they started to realise that this created glitches for mobile users, developers began to experiment with mobile indexing.
Mobile-first indexing means that Google will now largely crawl, index and rank the mobile version of the site, in preference over the desktop version, reveals Jessica Jones in The Importance of Responsive Web Design for Digital Next, a digital strategy and web design company. That’s where the need will arise for all big and small business establishments to look for a good responsive website development company.
Google Speak
A Google study reveals that 60% of people will not stay put on a website which is not mobile-friendly; and 67% of buyers will possibly purchase a product or use a service via mobile website, than through any other shopping channel.
Unfortunately, Gregory from Fresh Sparks reports that 44% of Fortune 500 companies are not mobile-friendly, as of now. Therefore, this is the golden opportunity for them to expand their service offerings to customers with the help of a responsive website development company. It’s an open invitation to business establishments trying to improve on their current conversion rates.
Tap the space now!
