Should I Have A Mobile Responsive Website?

Does Your Website Work On All Devices?

Do I need a mobile responsive website?

The short answer is YES!!

Mobile responsive is a term that means that your website should be designed to be easy to use on smaller screen sizes. This has always been the case. If your website is not easy to use on a mobile, then people won’t use it. Google has added to the fray with mobile responsiveness becoming another ranking factor that it uses in its algorithm to determine where a website should appear on a search engine result page (SERP).

Think about the times that you have spent on a smartphone browsing for information. If this information is clunky, and difficult to use, then you will visit a different place on the internet to find this information.

First Internet Phones

Back when internet-enabled mobile phones were first starting off (WAP) there was a need that was identified for people who wanted information whilst on the move. People would browse for train travel times or football results, with the webpages loading up a desktop version of the website, resulting in (very) slow loading times, big bills and a general bad browsing experience.

Separate websites

This brought about the rise in a separate ‘mobile only’ website that you may still see, these are websites that start with m. rather than www. These websites were a streamlined version of the desktop website, with less functionality and content, only displaying the real ‘meat’ of the website, this lead to a better user experience when browsing on mobile, and a better potential for a sale or conversion of some type.

Cost Vs User Experience

For business owners, this may be an issue, however, as it means designing, or more likely paying for multiple websites to be created for different devices. Then of course there are now tablets such as iPads or the Samsung galaxy, which are much bigger than mobile screens, but smaller than desktops. Designing a new website for each screen size is out of the question for the majority of companies.

Responsive Design

Responsive design is the best solution to this issue. In a nutshell, responsive design is an automatic restructure of your website to best suit the size of the screen that the visitor is using. The content ‘stacks’ from left to right on smaller screens. This means that there will be only one place to make the updates, rather than having to visit several different web spaces to update the content.

If your website is not responsive, or you are getting errors and warnings from Google, it may be time to give us a call! Use the box underneath to get in touch with our friendly team.