The explosion of mobile has to be one of the biggest challenges that is being faced by marketers today. If you see the volume of online traffic as well as the hours that are being spent online, you will notice how mobile has surpassed desktop. This is because the consumers’ preferred method of accessing the web has become through their mobile phones.
A responsive web design also known as RWD is the answer to providing the best experiences across devices. Introduced in 2010, there are many benefits of a responsive web design. For starters, it allows you to take your desktop site and deliver it to any device, in a way that it fits on the screen. This way, users are able to interact without having to zoom or scroll.
As brands evaluate the effectiveness of their responsive experiences, a number of different myths that have been built over the years, have started emerging around responsive web design services. Let’s have a look at some of the top ones in the following list:
1. Responsive Websites Give You More Control
There are many brands, especially the ones that are investing a significant amount of time and capital into building a responsive site in-house, for whom the RWD is representing an opportunity of taking over control of their mobile experiences. Although it does offer more control over the adaption of desktop experiences to mobile screens, responsive designs limit you when it comes to delivering different experiences on desktop as well as mobile. On the other hand, mobile experience optimization gives you the control to provide mobile users with distinct experiences. This is how you can meet their different needs as well as expectations.
2. Responsive Websites Offer an Optimized User Experience
Amongst the many benefits of a responsive web design, one that often comes up is better user experience. RWD undoubtedly provides a better user experience as compared to pinch-and-zoom mobile websites. However, if you think simply avoiding pinching and zooming is enough, you are wrong.
When it comes to the behavior of consumers, it is different on mobile and on desktop. When you go for mobile-specific optimizations, displaying specific content based on location is necessary for effectively engaging your consumers on mobile and for driving higher conversions for your business.
3. Responsive Websites Are A Must for SEO
In the year 2015, the thought of responsive web designs being a must for SEO came back into the spotlight because of Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm update. Adapting the desktop experience to smaller screens with the help of using responsive designs does not enable websites to meet Google’s mobile-friendly criteria.
As a web development company in India, we understand that mobile-friendliness is only the first step when it comes to delivering better mobile experiences. In conclusion to this point, responsive web designs alone are not enough to stay ahead of the curve for the next Google algorithm update that hits you in the coming future.
4. Responsive Websites Mean Faster Load Time
One of the benefits of a responsive web design is that it allows a single URL for a desktop as well as a mobile rather than redirecting to a separate m.dot site when it comes to Google’s mobile search results or from any other website.
Although responsive websites may only be losing microseconds on a redirect, they can become way slower as they are trying to deliver all the same heavy, slow-loading assets as well as HTML content to every device. A study by The Search Agency in 2013 found that the average load time for responsive websites was around 4.8 times more compared to an m.dot site.
Also, a 2014 study in the month of June, done by Keynote and Internet Retailer showed that the average page load time on smartphones for a dozen top retail sites was about 18 seconds. However, ⅔ of the smartphone users out there, expect a website to load in 4 seconds or even less than that.
This means that with responsive design alone, the HTML may go on to render correctly on mobile devices. However, your mobile website is not as fast as it should be. This eventually leads to a dramatic and low conversion rate. Did you know that even a 1-second delay in your page load time can translate into a 7% loss in your conversions?
Therefore, in order to increase your responsive website’s conversion rate and deliver rich as well as fast mobile experiences matching your customers’ expectations, you must apply some unique delivery acceleration techniques that can be built into mobile experience optimization platforms.
5. Responsive Websites Allow You to Create the Best Layouts
One of the great advantages of responsive web design services is that you can adjust the layout of your web design to be different for different screen sizes out there. For example, one can change from a 3-column layout on a larger screen to just a 1-column layout for fitting a narrower mobile screen.
However, the flexibility that you will be having in terms of altering the layout for mobile would be limited. With RWD alone, there is nothing that can really be easily done to move something back to the top of the mobile page. Therefore, while you may be able to optimize the layout to fit well on the screen, it will not be optimized for the mobile user’s context – which is again, the very core to meeting customer expectations.
Hiring a website development company in India, can tell you that there are many benefits of a responsive web design. However, as stated above, these benefits have to be used right, in order to really be fruitful for your business. Just by hiring responsive web design services, you will not see the improvements that you were looking for. Make sure to adapt responsive web design techniques, but only in the full sense that they actually give your business the conversion rates it deserves.
