- Reading time: 3 mins
- Topics:
- Website Design & Development
You’re in a rush and need to pay an important bill. Your laptop is at home, you’re waiting in line for lunch, but you really need to get this taken care of. You pull out your cell phone, open your browser, and type in your bank’s URL, only to find that their website is an absolute mess on your cell phone’s screen. You scratch your head, because it looks so nice on your laptop, but the website you’re seeing now is nearly impossible to navigate. You spend all of your time waiting in line trying to figure out how to access your bill pay account, to no avail.
Have you been in this situation? If you’re unfamiliar with the way a website works, the phrase for a fluid website that self-adjusts according to the screen it’s being viewed on is called responsive web design. And it’s really important.
Here are a few reasons why:
- Mobile usage is increasing. Between December 2013 and December 2015, smartphone internet consumption grew by 78 percent, according to a study by comScore. That same study found that desktop internet consumption dropped, and mobile devices now account for nearly 2 out of 3 minutes spent online.
- There are a ton of ways to view a website. Today’s web is viewed on hundreds of unique monitors, laptops, tablets, and smartphones – and that number is growing every year. Responsive web design adjusts your site to the size of the viewing window, helping your visitor easily navigate through content regardless of the device being used.
- You could lose customers. According to a study done by Adobe, 38 percent of people will stop engaging with a website if the content and/or layout in unattractive, and oftentimes, a website that hasn’t been optimized for mobile or other devices is not only unattractive, but hard to navigate. The Huffington Post also reported that 57 percent of mobile users abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. A website that isn’t optimized for mobile often takes longer to load due to the incapability with the screen.
- Google prefers it. The Huffington Post reported that “it’s more efficient for Google to bot crawl the site and then index and organize all the content that is online.” It’s easier because a site with responsive web design has just one URL and the same HTML, instead of something different for each version. There are a few others reasons, too, which can be found here.
Making sure your website is optimized for mobile and other devices is really a no-brainer in this day and age.