In the early days of mobile devices, it was industry standard to have two difference websites: one for desktop and one for mobile. While some companies have stuck with maintaining two different sites, it’s unwise to do so because the majority of websites are moving to a responsive design.
What is a responsive design website?
Put simply, a responsive design website is a website that can be viewed comfortably on all devices. Since a website optimized for desktop will be clunky and uncomfortable to view on mobile, it’s important to have one optimized for mobile. As previously mentioned, in the old days, this was done by separating the two sites. Now, responsive design websites allow you to maintain one website that automatically adjusts to the screen it is being viewed on.
Why did the industry move away from having separate mobile and desktop sites?
There are several reasons why there are fewer mobile sites around. The first one is that a responsive design allows for a better user experience across devices. It used to be that a mobile site provided a user with less information and was generally seen as inferior to a desktop site. At the time, this wasn’t a problem because smartphones were a novelty and just having a mobile site was groundbreaking. This has changed because smartphone traffic to website has increased. These days 55 percent of website traffic comes from smartphones. That’s a huge percentage of your potential customers who need your website’s desktop information formatted in a different way.
With a responsive design website, a user knows they are seeing the same information they would get on a desktop site because the website itself adjusts to screen size. This improvement in user experience also improves a sites SEO because Google and other search engines have an easier time crawling it and don’t have to guess which version of your website is the main one.
Another huge benefit of responsive design is that companies no longer need to maintain two versions of a website, which saves time and money.
If you haven’t already moved over to a responsive design website, it’s time to make the change. Google’s starting to make a shift toward favoring mobile content over desktop content and this is one way to make sure you don’t get left behind.
