A Mobile Responsive Website and Why You Need It

The terms responsive and mobile responsive are used, often interchangeably, to mean the same type of website. In truth, they are quite different. No wonder there’s such confusion about what each term means exactly.

What’s a Responsive Website?

A mobile responsive website is crafted and optimized in such a way that it looks great and mostly performs the same across all devices and platforms. In being responsive, the website is designed to adapt to the device it’s viewed on. On smaller screen sizes like mobile devices, the layout can display differently than it would on a computer or laptop with the possibility that some items or features might even be left off in the interest of space and formatting.

What’s a Mobile Responsive Website?

A mobile responsive website is a copy of your website designed and optimized in such a way that it looks great, loads fast and performs dynamically across all devices and platforms including mobile devices. Other than the scale of the website, there are no changes to the layout or loss of anything. Everything on the standard website is also here, just on a smaller scale.

In understanding now the difference between the two website types, it’s clear to see that there would be an advantage in having a mobile responsive website. Especially if you consider a few important statistics.

Why a Mobile Responsive Website is What You Need

As of 2018, 77% of Americans own a mobile device and nearly 60% of all search engine queries are conducted on them.  Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital because search engines are how many people find small businesses so it’s important that your website be visible there. Your business website should be easy for the search engines to read, navigate, and index and a mobile responsive web design certainly fits the bill. Speed is an important factor in mobile responsive web design and it’s an important aspect in search engine algorithms as well. The search engines love speed and a site that’s quick to load will attain a higher rank.

In its quest for a secure internet, Google has been making a lot of changes to its algorithm over the last couple of years which has put the SEO landscape in a state of nearly constant change.

Up until its April 2018 update, websites were rewarded by Google with slightly better rankings for being secured (usually with an SSL certificate) and being mobile-friendly. After the update, Google is now penalizing websites that aren’t optimized for mobile. And with as many as 44% of the top Fortune 500 companies not optimized for mobile, now is the best time to ensure your website utilizes a mobile responsive design.

Conclusion

With the growing rise of mobile use and search, business owners need to do everything they can to make sure that visitors can easily find their websites and to ensure that their user experiences on them are easy and positive.

In crafting a business website that’s mobile responsive, you have several key advantages.

• You’ll have an edge over some of your competition.
• You’ll provide a fast, positive user experience.
• You’ll have a site the search engines will easily crawl and index.

With a mobile responsive website for your business, you’ll increase the chances of the customers you want of finding you. You’ll bolster your SEO efforts and drive increasing amounts of targeted traffic to your website while growing your online audience.

To see how easy converting your site to a mobile responsive website can be, contact us today for a free consultation.