Mobile-Friendly Responsive Web Design
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Does your site adopt mobile-friendly responsive web design? If you don’t know if your website is mobile-friendly responsive, you can use Mobile Friendliness Test Tool by Bing or Search Console’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool by Google to test it. Professional web agencies or web studios build mobile-friendly responsive websites.
However, mobile-friendly websites aren’t necessarily responsive. Check out our article on why mobile-friendly websites aren’t necessarily responsive.
What is Mobile-Friendly Responsive Web Design?
Mobile-friendly responsive web design refers to designing a website that can easily be accessed and used by a mobile device. It automatically responds to a user’s screen size and orientation by altering image size and design elements.
A mobile-friendly website should have the following characteristics.
- Viewport configured correctly
- Zoom control is not restricted
- Page content fits device width
- Text on the page is readable
- Links and tap targets are sufficiently large and touch-friendly
For example, a user sees content shown in one column on a smartphone, two columns on a tablet and three columns on a desktop.
Mobile-friendly websites may use the same URL but different HTML code for different devices (i.e. dynamic serving), and that use different URLs and different HTML code for different devices with HTTP/HTTPS redirects (i.e. separate URLs). However, they are not considered mobile responsive and not recommended by search engines like Google. Besides, the development and maintenance costs are lower for responsive design than dynamic serving and separate URLs.
Why I Need Mobile-Friendly Responsive Web Design
Better User Experience
A non-mobile-friendly website is difficult to view and use on smartphones because its users need to pinch or zoom to read the content. Such bad experience will drive users away. Alternatively, a mobile friendly responsive website is readable and immediately usable and hence gives better user experience.
More and more people make appointments, buy products and/or services, sign up to services or memberships, blog about themselves and their hobbies, etc. on mobile devices. Ensure that your website visitors have a good user experience on their mobile devices.
More Web Traffic via Mobile than Desktops
Smartphones have changed the way that people communicate and find information.
GSM Association reported in July 2019 that the mobile industry connects over 3.5 billion people to the internet (47% of the global population). Mobile is the primary means of internet access in low- and middle-income countries.
According to Statista, there will be 3.8 billion smartphone users worldwide in 2021 with a 18.75% increase from 2019. This means that almost half of the world’s population will have a smartphone by 2021. Besides, mobile devices account for 52.6% of web traffic worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Therefore, a mobile-friendly responsive website is an integral part of an online presence.
Higher Ranking on Search Engines
In 2018 Google launched mobile-first indexing which means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a website instead of desktop for indexing and ranking when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query on Google Search. The reason is that most of the Google Search users use mobile devices. In other words, mobile-friendly responsive websites will rank higher.
Increasingly Higher Conversions
According to Business Insider, mobile commerce will reach $284 billion, or 45% of the total U.S. eCommerce market, by 2020. It will surpass that from desktop users in the coming years with a growth rate of 200% from 2015 to 2019. This is because smartphone users visit an eCommerce website from social media and other influencer websites.
Implement Mobile-Friendly Responsive Web Design
The best and most affordable way to implement mobile-friendly responsive web design is to use a fully responsive website theme. As the world’s leading content management system (CMS) trusted by over 35% of all the website users worldwide, WordPress makes changing themes a breeze.
Good responsive theme authors like Qode Bridge and Muffin Betheme have the following mobile-friendly characteristics in mind when designing the themes.
- Viewport configured correctly
- Zoom control is not restricted
- Page content fits device width
- Text on the page is readable
- Links and tap targets are sufficiently large and touch-friendly
Bonus Tips
You may want to ensure the following.
- Call-to-action button big enough
- Font big enough
- Remove pop-ups
- Remove mouse-over and parallax effects
- Optimize images
- Combine files
- Fast page load
Conclusion
Given statistics, if you’re not optimizing your website for the increasing number of mobile users, you’re behind your competitors who are.
Besides, Google ranks mobile-friendly websites higher as internet visitors use mobile devices more than desktop. Google recommends Responsive Web Design with the same HTML code and URLs.
Therefore, it is imperative to have mobile-friendly responsive web design. The best and cheapest way is to use a fully responsive website theme.
