What Is Responsive UX Design And Why Should We Invest In Responsive Design?

Responsive UX design is becoming a vital part of website development. It is basically the way of making your website accessible and easy to navigate for users across a wide range of technological devices. Responsive UX design provides your web page a universal element unlike other web design approaches which are geared towards particular devices. This is what makes this approach so significant. 

Before knowing why we should invest in responsive UX design let us brush up on what responsive web design is.

What is responsive web design?

The UX in responsive UX design stands for user experience. The process of responsive web design mainly involves enhancing and improving the user experience for visitors visiting your website. The approach of responsive web design has a fluidity that not only improves the user experience but also adjusts to whatever device the user is viewing the website on. A responsive website can be easily viewed on any kind of device from laptop to smartphones to tablets. 

Now let us check out why we should invest in responsive web design: 

Why should one invest in responsive design? 

In recent times we are living in a multi-screen society and various people are using various kinds of devices for accessing a website. Because of this, it becomes essential for your website to be viewable across many devices because you never know what device a person will be using for viewing your website. 

The statistics of responsive websites suggests one to appeal for both desktop and mobile viewers. Presently the number of mobile users outnumbers the number of desktop users and it will continue to grow as global mobile accessibility increases. In addition to this, in the year 2015, Google announced that mobile accessibility and mobile friendliness will be considered as a major ranking factor in its search engine algorithms. 

This means that websites that are not mobile friendly will lose their ground in search engine results as they will not be able to provide a good experience to mobile viewers. 

In brief here we will discuss the importance of responsive UX design for your website:

1) It will be very Cost Effectiveness 

Maintaining separate versions of your website for mobile and non mobile users can be really expensive. But by implementing responsive design for your website, a website owner can save money by eliminating the cost for the development and maintenance of a mobile website. The owner has to payone time for a single website design and that will appeal to all visitors and all devices. 

2) It will make the user experience of your website better

The best thing about a responsive website is that it provides a better user experience. The major factor which indicates the quality of user experience is the time a user spends on your website. If they find your website extremely inaccessible or hard to navigate, they will not stay on your website for a longer time. 

But on the other hand if your website quickly adapts to the change in screen size, then users will not face any issues in accessing the links and buttons on your website. As a result of this, the user experience of your website will be better and users will spend more time on your website. Improved user experience will lead to more referrals and new customers for your business.

3) Responsive UX design will lead to an increase in mobile traffic

As per statistics, in recent times nearly 52% of world wide web traffic originated from mobile devices. That accounts for almost half of the Internet traffic and points it out to you that you cannot ignore responsive website design.

You can experiment by checking how many visitors to your website are coming from mobile devices and the time they are spending on your website. Then implement responsive design for your website and then compare the two numbers. After implementing responsive design for your website there will definitely be an increase in the number of mobile users and the time they are spending on your website. 

4) Flexibility

When you have a business website with responsive design, then it will become easier for you to make any changes on your website. You will not have to invest time making changes on two different versions of a single website. This flexibility is a major advantage in case of responsive website design, whenever you want to make any kind of changes, you will have to do it once only. 

5) Search engine optimization gains

Search engine optimization is a strategy that is used by many organizations for boosting themselves in SERPs. The more you will get at the top of SERPs, there will be more chances of potential customers finding your website.

Responsive UX design can actually help you with SEO because Google gives preference to websites that are responsive and mobile-friendly. In addition to other SEO factors, responsiveness will help you to get a major boost in search engine results. 

6) It helps to save your website from duplicate content penalty

This is one of the major advantages of responsive web design. If you have two versions of a single website, then indirectly you are creating duplicate content. Though search engines are getting smarter with each passing day, they still need to understand which version of your website is more important.

If you are publishing your content for both mobile and desktop versions of your website, then your content remains the same, even if the URL is different.This will highly affect the rankings of both of your websites, because search engines will not be able to understand which content is relevant.

In case if you want both the versions of your website to rank well in the SERPs, then you will have to create two SEO strategies and campaigns and invest money in producing and publishing unique contents for both the desktop and mobile versions.

Since having two separate strategies can be quite expensive, most website owners prefer using a canonical tag on the mobile version of their website that points to the desktop version of their website. As a result of this, most mobile versions of websites do not rank well in search engines.

But with a responsive web design for your website, all these difficulties can be successfully avoided. This is the major factor that highlights the importance of responsive web design. 

Conclusion,

Therefore we can say that responsive web design is an essential part of any modern web strategy- and make it a part of yours too. You can reach out to a reputed website design and development company who provide top-quality website design services to implement responsive web design for your website.