Responsive websites aim to provide a flawless user experience across different devices.
As more and more users use devices other than their desktops for online activities, your website must be capable of functioning across different displays.
Why?
Mobile devices account for over half the website traffic in the world. A non-responsive website will only lose leads and eventually lead to further investment required in your web design.
If you don’t have the technical expertise to build a responsive website from scratch, you can always rely on site builders. Crazy Domains Website Builder is a simple drag-and-drop platform that lets you create and publish professional mobile-ready websites in a few clicks.
On the other hand, if you have a responsive website right off the bat, you can benefit from the following advantages:
1. Higher Google search rankings
A recent survey found that 73.1% of web designers claim non-responsive web pages are the main reason users leave a website. Even Google has “mobile-friendliness” as one of the prime factors when analysing search engine rankings.
2. Improved sales
A responsive webpage is optimised to make your website look and work its best, no matter the screen dimensions. A great user experience results in higher conversion rates and sales growth.
3. Mobile advertising benefits
Mobile advertising has had significant growth in recent years. During the pandemic, the spending on mobile advertising was estimated to be at $91.52 billion in 2020 alone.
As users continue to browse through their mobile devices, you can earn revenue by integrating mobile ads into your responsive webpage.
How to Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Incorporate responsive breakpoints
A breakpoint in responsive design is the point when a website’s content and design adapts in a certain manner to produce the best user experience.
Since users need to access every webpage across devices, the software should perfectly render across each screen size. Distorted, cut-out or obscured content and images should not be included.
Earlier, pixels were the measurement used for a website layout. Designers have now upgraded to use fluid grids. The rules for grids can be set using codes.
Responsive breakpoints, which are defined in code, are also called CSS/media query breakpoints. This allows website content to display an accurate layout as it responds to these points and adjusts itself according to the screen size.
Instead of having a fixed width or height, grids divided into columns, heights, and widths proportionally size your site’s contents. This results in the best possible user experience across different screens.
RELATED: How to Drive Results with Responsive Web Design
2. Make provisions for touchscreens
Developers should design websites keeping in mind both mouse and touchscreen users.
Here are a few ways to design responsive websites accessible via touchscreens:
- Adopting large items to make them easier to click with a fingertip on laptops
- Making smaller elements easy to detect on mobile screens
- Choosing themes or templates that are mobile-friendly
- Using larger fonts and buttons
- Avoiding the usage of the hover function and submenus
- Enabling haptic feedback for user-friendliness
- Avoiding placing links where people tap or scroll
- Avoiding long text entry requirements
- Using a simple theme with menial elements
- Offering the lowest possible loading times
3. Include responsive images and videos
Images and videos also need to display seamlessly across different screen sizes. To do this, you can code the rules that determine how images should be displayed on the website.
This includes identifying whether they’re made to be the full width, or need to be removed or handled differently.
The simplest way to do this is to choose the largest size that might be needed and scale it down based on the screen size.
Don’t forget to apply responsiveness to your brand logo, too. If you don’t have one yet — or are planning to revamp it — a free logo maker in Australia allows you to create high-quality logo designs from customisable premium templates. No design skills are required! You may also look for a logo design website to help you.
4. Enable responsive typography
Font sizes defined with pixels suit static websites. But responsive websites require responsive typography to work across different screen sizes. This is where fluid typography comes in.
Font sizes and line heights are built to respond smoothly to viewport size changes with fluid typography. This is made possible with viewport units such as viewport width (vw), viewport height (vh), the smaller value of viewport width and height (vmin), and the larger value (vmax).
With viewports, you can design sites to be responsive to different devices, windows, and screen sizes.
5. Use media queries
Using media queries allows you to apply extensive changes to your website layout to support certain screen sizes. These simple filters make it easy to alter styles based on the device used.
6. Use accelerated mobile pages
Accelerated mobile pages (AMPs) optimise the website’s content to suit different screen sizes on mobiles.
As a web developer, your internet speed is crucial when building responsive websites. AMPs are lightweight pages that help load pages easily and quickly regardless of the user’s internet speed.
7. Create mobile-friendly pages
Mobile-friendly pages are built with Responsive Web Design (RWD) in mind. RWD crafts sites for an optimal viewing experience across different screen sizes.
Responsive Web Content Management Systems help manage and modify websites with cross-browser capabilities.
Once all that’s over, it’s time to test your website’s responsiveness!
Check if the layout adjusts to the correct number of columns; if the content fits well inside the layout elements and containers on different screens; and, if the font sizes fit each screen.
Users come first
With more and more users getting online, responsive websites are non-negotiable, especially for small businesses that make a profit online.
While you can always learn it on your own and build it from scratch, getting an expert web developer to do it for you can also save you time and effort. Plus, it lets you focus more on running your business!
