Responsive Design: The Best Way to Build a Mobile-Friendly Website

If you want to build a website, it’s becoming increasingly necessary that you make sure it’s mobile-friendly. Historically, there’s been a variety of ways to make your presence known to mobile users; but, the best way for you to build a mobile-friendly website right now is through responsive design.

What is Responsive Design?

When people refer to “responsive design,” they’re talking about the way that a website is designed to scale and adjust properly to any device automatically, regardless of the dimensions and device that the site is being visited on. This method of design is perfect for optimizing your site for mobile devices to make it “mobile-friendly,” because it’s code will automatically change images, navigation bars, calls to action, and more when it detects that it’s not on a regular desktop computer. Utilizing responsive design is important for improving the user experience because a site that isn’t properly responsive will be difficult to use on a smaller touch-oriented screen.

So, how do you check if your site is already mobile-friendly? There are a plethora of free tools that you can use to determine how well your website works on a mobile device, including Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Tools like this one can show you how your site looks on a mobile device, what’s loading properly, what’s not loading properly, and things that you can do in order to improve your mobile site’s user experience.

Why Use Responsive Design for Your Mobile Site?

Access to Mobile Users

Did you know that 60% of overall traffic online comes from mobile devices? If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, then that means you’re missing out on more than half of all website traffic. If you’re designing an eCommerce website, neglecting mobile-friendliness means that you’re reaching a fraction of the customers that you could be. For an online blog, not making your site responsive to mobile means you’re ignoring a huge amount of potential readers. Any way you slice it, not putting effort into making your site responsive and supported on mobile is a huge mistake in 2019.

Keeps Your Site Ranked High

As soon as Google announced that they’ll be using mobile-first indexing, which meant they’d be ranking sites based on their mobile version before their desktop version, it became very real how important optimization for mobile has become for any website online. This means that, if your website is responsive to both desktop and mobile devices with high mobile-friendliness and usability, search engines like Google will rank your site higher on SERPs (search engine result pages). In order to keep your traffic high and not lose out on any potential sales/views, you’ll need to comply to the new mobile-first mentality.

Avoid Multiple Sites & Duplicate Content

If you choose to go the route of creating an entirely separate site that’s optimized for mobile and runs parallel to your desktop site, then you run the risk of being penalized for duplicate content by search engines. In order to avoid this, typically you can add canonical tags to your mobile site to let search engine bots know that you’re not publishing spammy duplicate content. But, all this extra effort may not even be worth it in the case that bots miss those tags.

By enabling a responsive design on your main website, you won’t have to worry about creating an entirely separate secondary mobile site that needs its own build time and maintenance. You’ll save time, money and confusion by keeping everything on the same site, and optimizing your design so that it works across all devices. With a separate mobile site, you’ll have to constantly be updating and changing it so that it’s always working the way it should. But, with responsive design, all you’ll have to do is modify your current website’s design so that it functions correctly everywhere.

Building a Responsive Mobile-Friendly Website

There are two main ways to go about creating a responsive website; you can either code it all from scratch, or you can utilize a pre-built responsive site theme. There’s a few pros and cons when it comes to both of these options, but it mainly comes down to how much time and effort you can afford to put into your website.

If you want to build from scratch, you’ll need to either hire a web developer or code the website yourself (if you have the technical knowledge to do so). When you’re building a website from a blank slate, you can design it completely free without being restricted by a template; this can be both good and bad. If you know what you’re doing and are ready to spend a lot of time working with a developer in order to establish well-made HTML and CSS code that not only works but is responsive, then you can go ahead and try this. But, if you want your website up and running quickly with little-to-no troubleshoot time needed, you may prefer the site theme option.

When you use a responsive site theme to build your website, you’ll be choosing a template that’s already been designed and optimized to work across all devices and that’s ready for you to plug information into. While you obviously don’t have the complete freedom like you would if you coded from scratch, most website themes have a wide variety of customization options that allow you to change things up and design them to fit around your exact website’s unique needs. If you’re building an online store, the best eCommerce platforms will have a wide variety of themes for you to choose from; all of which are responsive without any extra charges.

Tips on Making Your Site Mobile-Friendly

• Optimize content for small screens. Remember that, while your blog post or photo gallery might look great on a computer, it’s formatting might be mixed up once it’s translated to a small vertical screen. Keep paragraphs short so that they’re easier to scroll through on a phone and use images that will scale properly on mobile devices.
• Keep small touch-screens in mind. All of the elements on your mobile site, from the navigation bar to the buy button, need to work under both the conditions of a cursor and a finger. Important buttons need to be large enough that they can be easily pressed, and isolated enough so that fingers don’t accidentally press other things on the site.
• Make sure your pages load fast. Page speed is already an important factor in user experience and SEO, but it’s even more important on a mobile device. 53% of users will exit a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load on a mobile device; this can skyrocket your bounce rate if you’re not careful.

Wrapping Up

As the Internet at large continues to shift more towards being mobile-first, websites need to adapt in order to survive. If you’re looking to build a website that utilizes responsive design, or if you want to update your existing site to become responsive and not get left behind by the ever-changing internet, it doesn’t have to be an expensive and time-consuming struggle to figure out. By customizing a responsive theme, whether from within the website-building platform of your choice or through a 3^rd party theme store, your website will be optimized for all users, no matter what device they use.

Jimmy Rodriguez

Jimmy Rodriguez is the COO & Co-founder of 3dcart, a leading eCommerce solution. As an e-commerce authority, he’s focused on helping internet retailers succeed online by developing digital strategies to drive more traffic to their websites and increase conversions.