User experience is important for any website owner or developer. It goes on to define how and for how long the visitor will engage with your website. There are a number of elements that come together to define the UX on your website. One of the most important of such factors is the responsiveness of your web design. In this article, you will learn all you need to know about responsive web design.
For online businesses, their website is their main salesperson. It is the point where the conversion takes place—only if the website is optimized accordingly. If the user enjoys engaging with your business on your website, they would convert quicker. One the other hand, if your website yields a poor UX, they’d leave from your website without even engaging further. This explains why creating a responsive web design is an important part of modern web development.
Moreover, since the UX also defines the dwell time and bounce rate on a website, it is also important for the search visibility. So, read on to find out what a responsive web design is and how it works.
Related Article: How to improve bounce rate for your website?
What is a responsive web design?
Responsive website design, or what is also called RWD, is a modern website development approach. Depending upon the size and dimensions of a screen, a website’s display needs to grow or shrink to give an optimal view to the user. Hence, RWD aims to make a website render well on different screens and devices. The idea is to make the web design responsive to the display requirement of the device it is being accessed through.
Simply put, RWD works to develop a website’s properties in a way that the device it is used on determines the way that it will be displayed.
How does RWD work?
There are a number of different website development elements that come together to make a website’s design responsive.
It uses cascading style sheets (CSS) to define the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML. With CSS, various settings take place to serve different style properties of the user’s device like the screen size, resolution, orientation, colour capability, and other characteristics. A few CSS RWD properties also include the viewport and media queries.
Why is responsive web design important?
Without question, your target market must be using more than one device to search your business on the internet. Now, they could be using desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, or so. If you want to ensure that all these users have a great experience on your website, it is important to have a responsive web design.
Listed below are some of the key reasons why having a responsive web design is important:
## RWD makes your website render well on different devices
If your website doesn’t have a responsive web design, it won’t display properly on different devices. For example, if your website was originally designed for a desktop, it won’t render well on the mobile phones. As a result, it will ruin the experience of the mobile users on your website. This can lead to a number of issues. For instance, the menu tabs might not work. Or the user might have to zoom in/out again and again to click on the tabs, hyperlinks, or CTA elements. Hence, it is important to have a responsive web design to ensure that your website renders well on a variety of screens and devices.
## A responsive web design is important for a great UX
In the point above, I have explained what sort of issues responsive web design keeps from happening. Apparently, if the above stated issues occur, it will ruin the experience of your visitors. As a result, they’d leave your website without engaging with it. This will further bring down your web traffic and ranking. Hence, for a great UX on your website, a responsive web design is crucial.
## RWD saves from having different site versions
If there wasn’t the concept of RWD, businesses would require having different versions of a website for different devices. There would be one for desktop and another for mobile (or maybe even more for some other device!) With this, you can keep a single website for all the devices. Not to mention how along with this, you’ll be able to ensure that every user has a great experience on your website.
## From management standpoint, RWD is great
If there were two versions of your website, apparently, you’d need to manage both. Now, this can become a real task. The website management would have taken double the time and efforts. Therefore, maintaining a responsive web design becomes also much easier.
## RWD saves costs
Website management and upgradation apparently costs money. In absence of a responsive website—when you’d have to maintain more than one website versions—the management and upgradation cost would be double (or even triple!) Hence, having a responsive web design helps save money.
How can you make your web design responsive?
There are a number of ways you can keep a responsive design for your website–
#Use responsive Meta tags in your HTML document
#Add media queries to your layout
#Images and embedded videos should be responsive
#The typography should be easily readable on mobile devices
So, these are some of the ways that you can make your website responsive. However, it requires certain degree website development knowledge.
If you don’t know how to work with HTML, CSS and the likes, you would require web services.
Final Word
The UX of a website is extremely crucial of E-Commerce organizations. It goes on to determine many things like whether/how the visitor will engage with your business. The UX of a website is largely dependent upon the responsiveness of its web design. To have a responsive web design means developing website in a way that it renders (or displays) well on different devices and screens. Hence, it counters the need for having more than one website versions for different device. Therefore, it also saves management and cost. So, it is crucial to make sure that website development is done in the way to have a responsive web design.
