Is your website important to your business? Is your website responsive?
Responsive web design, put simply, is a website which adjusts to fit the screen size that the user is viewing the site on, be that a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop or a desktop computer.
A truly successful responsive site is one that looks great and works brilliantly at all of those screen sizes. Easier said than done!
If you’ve invested in a new site in the last few years and it’s not responsive, you might be wondering if it’s worth letting go of that site and investing in a new one. is responsive really THAT important? Well yes.
So why consider investing in a responsive design ? Well there are lots of reasons but we reckon these are the five most important points in favour of having a responsive site;
Reason one – the rise of mobile use
So many people these days use their phone to browse the internet so it makes sense that your website makes it easy for them to do so. Mobile internet usage was predicted to overtake desktop usage by the end of 2015 so that may well have already happened.
If you are selling online, responsive can make the difference between winning and losing the sale. 67% of users claim they would be more likely to purchase from a mobile friendly site. In the UK, 7/10 people have a smartphone and in a recent survey of mobile use in Europe, 32% of Brits claimed to make a purchase monthly directly via their phone. Compelling stats!
Reason two – the importance of social media, email marketing and blogging
If social media, email marketing or blogging are an important part of your marketing activity, the chances are that part of the reason for doing this is to push people to your website so people can find out more and become more embedded in your brand. You might tweet links to your latest blog, your next newsletter could contain links to your online shop, your latest case study or a new portfolio of images. Imagine if they land on that page whilst browsing social or emails on their phone or tablet. Are you 100% sure that’s going to be a good experience? If you want them to go ahead and make a purchase, can they easily do that without too much effort? Can they still see your calls to action or are they now not very prominent?
Reason three – responsive is future friendly
A new website is a big investment for companies and if you’re a small business owner, unsure of the ROI of a website, the investment seems even larger. You know it’s important to have a good web presence but you don’t have endless resources to put to it. So the last thing you want is to have the investment you’ve made compromised by technological advances and changes in the ways people access the internet.
If in the next few years, your customers and clients start to use watches, TV screens, games consoles or glasses to view your website, it will still look great and be very user friendly if it is responsive. If it isn’t, it will likely be even more of a pain to view than it is now.
Reason four – responsive is better for SEO
The reasons as to why SEO is better with responsive mainly relates to those companies who currently have a desktop AND a mobile site to manage.
Responsive sites are a better option for SEO than having a desktop site and a separate mobile site. Google prefers responsive as they have just one URL structure to deal with. If you have two sites, you have twice the work in terms of SEO campaigns as they’re seen by Google as two separate sites. You’ll also likely have two sets of analytics to view if you are keeping track of such things, which is just extra work.
Beyond those who have mobile and desktop versions, Google also includes positive user experience as a ranking factor. It can be annoying to find something you’re looking for on a mobile device, to then go back to that later on a desktop and find yourself on the mobile site. This isn’t a good user experience and so as well as just being a little irritating and potentially halting a sale, this will also affect your Google rankings.
Google have now stated that they rank non responsive sites less favourably than responsive ones. Bad news if you aren’t responsive but your competitors are!
Reason five – speed
Responsive sites load much quicker than desktop ones and when sites are being viewed on a mobile device on less than ideal wifi connections or 4G then this is even more important. People are impatient and if a site takes more than a few seconds to load they just get distracted or irritated.
Our responsive website options start from just £995+VAT so if your site is still not responsive and you want to ensure that your site works as hard for you as possible, why not give us a call?