Have you ever opened a website on your phone and immediately closed it due to a poor experience? If you have, you’re not alone.
An increasing number of people are surfing the web on their mobile devices. For businesses, this trend offers an opportunity as well as a threat. A business needs to offer a great mobile website experience. Without it, you’re losing out on potential customers getting turned off by the experience.
So what’s the answer to this problem? You guessed it, Responsive Website Design. With responsive web design, your website looks good on all types of screens, whether it is a phone, tablet, or desktop.
In this guide, we’ll discuss all the basics of responsive website design and what steps you can take to improve it.
What is Responsive Web Design?
Responsive design is the method of designing web pages which makes the content adapt to the screen size across various devices.
For example, the resolution of your images might be set according to a wide desktop screen.
Since the screen resolution changes, that image will look distorted on a mobile device.
A responsive website will not face this problem. Responsive design makes it possible to deliver multiple variants of the same website across different screen sizes.
Importance of Responsive Design
We get an idea of the importance of a responsive website in the previous section. We saw how a responsive website helps users navigate your website across different devices with ease.
But let’s get into a bit more detail about why you should ensure that your website is responsive.
Over half of Google search now takes place on mobile. A medium accounting for such huge traffic cannot be ignored. So you should make sure that you’re not serving a desktop site to your mobile visitors.
Furthermore, the majority of social media is consumed on mobile devices as well. This means that a major chunk of your ad spends on social is taken up by mobile users.
If your landing page is not optimized for mobile, it’ll hurt the user experience for the visitors. This will result in low ROI marketing campaigns and wasted ad spending.
Finally, in its algorithm update, Google announced that mobile-friendliness is going to be a ranking factor. As a result, a site with an effective mobile experience will show up in the search engine results above the one without one.
To summarize, here are the main benefits of having responsive websites:
- A good and consistent user experience will result in higher conversion rates and sales
- Reach target customers across different devices and on different platforms
- Ability to rank higher on search engines
- You can stay ahead of your competition if their websites are not optimized for mobile
How to Make a Responsive Website
Now that we know what responsive design is and why it’s important for your website, let’s get into the best practices you can follow to make it responsive.
To work with a responsive design, you need to know the most common screen size breakpoints. A breakpoint is the width of a screen, according to which you implement new CSS styles.
Some of the most common breakpoints are:
- Mobile: 360 x 640 – 360 x 720 px
- Tablet: 768 x 1024 px
- Laptop: 1366 x 768 px
- High-res Desktop: 1920 x 1080 px
Set Your Media Query Ranges
Media queries specify the CSS to be implemented according to the specified breakpoints. The breakpoints can be unique to your design or you can use standardized breakpoints such as the Bootstrap standards.
- 576px for portrait phones
- 768px for tablets
- 992px for laptops
- 1200px for large devices
If you’re using a CMS such as WordPress, the Themes provide you with preset breakpoints which can be altered.
Responsive Images
You’ll want your images to automatically adjust according to the screen size of the user. You can implement the required CSS rules for this such as setting the width to a percentage(%) of the screen rather than in pixels.
Again, using a CMS like WordPress or Wix can help you ease the process by resizing the images automatically when you upload the media.
You can also use SVGs instead of PNGs or JPGs to make your images responsive. SVGs are Scalable Vector Graphics which can scale up or down infinitely without losing any quality.
Responsive Typography (Font)
You need to make sure that your text is legible across all screen sizes. A heading size of 64 px might look good on a desktop screen, but if the same size is translated into mobile screens, the text becomes hard to read.
On the other hand, a smaller text size of 12 px might be suitable for a mobile screen, you need to set the desktop font size to be at least 16 px for it to be easily readable.
Buttons
The size of the buttons on your website may seem like an afterthought, but that is not the case. Buttons play a vital role in deciding what kind of experience a user is getting on your site.
A screen cursor is much smaller than a human’s fingers. If the buttons are too small or are too close to each other, it becomes a hard task to click the button on a touchscreen device.
As a safety net, make sure your buttons are at least 48 x 48 px to ensure that they’re clickable.
Testing Responsiveness
You can test your website’s mobile-friendliness with Google’s mobile-friendly test. Enter the URL of your web page and click the “Test URL” button to get the results.
The results will tell you whether your website is mobile-friendly, and if not what might be the reasons. Google Search Console also constantly checks your website for mobile-friendliness and will alert you if there’s an error related to it.
Another way to test your website’s responsiveness is through Chrome or Edge Developer Tools. To access it, press CTRL+Shift+I on Windows or Command+Option+I on Mac. From here you can select from a range of mobile and tablet devices to test your responsiveness.
Responsive Web Design vs Adaptive Design
When deciding on your website’s design and structure, you can go one of two ways: Responsive Web Design or Adaptive Design.
As we discussed in its definition at the start, responsive web design involves using flexible layouts, flexible images, and media queries to create a website that looks good on any device, regardless of its size or resolution.
This means that the website will automatically adjust to fit the screen of the device that it is being viewed on, making it easy to use and navigate.
Adaptive design, on the other hand, involves creating fixed layouts for specific screen sizes and using device detection to serve the appropriate layout to the user.
This means that the website will not automatically adjust to fit the screen of the device, but will instead display a pre-determined layout. In other words, different versions of the website will be served across different screen sizes.
Of course, both approaches are equally viable and depend on your preferences. Both approaches have their pros and cons, and the best approach for a particular project will depend on the specific requirements and goals of the website.
Responsive Web Design Examples
Mozilla
Mozilla is a software company founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. Mozilla’s current products include the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird e-mail client (now through a subsidiary), Bugzilla bug tracking system, Gecko layout engine, Pocket “read-it-later-online” service, and others.
Their website functions across devices seamlessly by using responsive design best practices. They use a modern and easy-to-digest layout which translates into all screen sizes.
Yale
Yale University’s website is another good example of a responsive website. They have utilised a minimal design to get the reader’s focus on the text. The font size changes according to the screens which makes it easy for the visitors to read through.
Transferwise
It’s no surprise that Transferwise achieved so much success in such a short amount of time. TransferWise is a financial technology company that offers a fast, convenient, and affordable way to transfer money internationally.
The company’s online platform is easy to use, and customers can track their transfers in real-time. Being a fintech company requires a seamless user experience across all devices, and Transferwise achieves just that. You won’t feel the difference whether you’re using their services through your desktop or your phone.
For other inspirational website designs, you can visit the Media Queries website. They have a collection of the best responsive websites found on the internet.
Conclusion
To summarize, website design can be a complicated process with a steep learning curve. Even the smallest of mistakes can cause your visitors to leave your website without looking around.
If you’re not familiar with HTML and CSS, it becomes a daunting task. But if you know the basics of responsive website design and are familiar with what works and what doesn’t, it becomes easier to point out where the problem may lie.
You can always choose to work with website development experts to help you with building a responsive website. Even in that scenario, knowing all the stuff covered in this guide will help you work more efficiently with the developers. You’ll know exactly how to communicate your idea and turn it into a reality.
A3H is a digital marketing agency offering Website Development and Design, Digital Marketing, and Branding services. With our digital marketing expertise, we can help increase your visibility on search engines and social media platforms, bringing more traffic to your website.
Don’t let your competitors steal the spotlight online. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help take your business to the next level.
