Designing a responsive layout for a website is as important as its development. Various studies have shown that more than 50% of internet users access websites using their handheld devices such as mobile phones or tablets.
Given the figure above, isn’t it crucial to have a responsive website design? Yes, it certainly is. It won’t be wrong to say if a website doesn’t have a responsive design, it’s of no use.
Why do you need a responsive website design?
- For better user engagement.
- For improved search engine rankings.
- For enhanced website loading speed on devices.
- For getting more conversions & sales.
Although the primary objective of a responsive website is to deliver an excellent user experience, most webmasters think that a responsive design has to do only with the vertical rendering of the website.
In this blog post, we have shared 7 things to take care of so that your website becomes really responsive!
#1 Better user engagement
The very first sign of a responsive website would always be its ability to engage with the users. In other words, a perfect responsive design always facilitates better user engagement.
A responsive website would always help the users to browse different pages seamlessly & hassle-free.
Why should you care about user engagement?
- To get more conversions & sales.
- To get a lower bounce rate for your website.
- To gain higher rankings on search engines.
- To get a loyal audience for your website.
A professional web developer would always know how to build an engaging website. If you are on a budget, you can also consider hiring a professional website builder in India.
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#2 Flexible images
A responsive design must render the images of the website in a device-friendly manner. In other words, each image must change & adjust its size according to the screen resolution of the device.
Have you ever noticed on any website when you access it on your mobile that all the images of that website were shown out of your screen area and you had to scroll left or right in order to view those images? Or the images were stretched on mobile phones? This kind of website rendering is definitely not responsive.
A perfect responsive website will always render the complete image within your screen area and that too in the aspect ratio.
#3 Flexible contents
Along with the images, the texts on the website must be responsive to all kinds of screen resolutions. The whole idea here is to let your audience read the content of your website easily on their mobile devices.
What are the important things to take care of for making the contents flexible?
- The alignment and spacing of all the paragraphs must be optimized.
- The font size of all the content on your website must not be too big or too small.
- The content of your website must be visible to mobile users without zooming in.
- All the sentences on your web pages must have proper padding from left, right, top, and bottom.
Believe it or not, taking care of the above adjustments can do wonders for you in terms of user engagement and the overall conversions of your website too.
#4 Prominent call-to-actions
Call-to-action elements can be considered the backbone of your website. By optimizing them for your users, you can really grow your sales & conversions.
What’s a call to action?
A call-to-action is an element that encourages visitors to take some action on the website.
Some examples of a call-to-action element are below:
- Signup Now button
- Buy Now button
- Read More link or button
- Grab Now button
- Add to Cart button in case of e-commerce websites.
- Get A Quote button
For the mobile website, your website developer does need to make sure that all the call-to-action elements are visible prominently and don’t have any cosmetic errors such as misalignment, stretched buttons, etc.
#5 Easy navigation
One of the most common issues on the mobile version of a website is the lack of intuitive navigation. Because of this problem, your website visitors may find it difficult to browse the web pages on your site. As a result, you may get a high bounce rate and low conversions.
What’s the solution here?
Instead of using a standard menu, you can ask your web developer to use a hamburger menu.
Additionally, your website builder must ensure that the navigation on your mobile website is easy to use and that all the important sections of your website can be assessed through the hamburger menu.
The optimized navigation on your mobile website will not only enhance the user experience of your website but can also help in improving your SEO rankings.
Recommended post: 6 Ways to enhance the user experience on your website
#6 Accessibility
Taking care of accessibility is really very important in the case of mobile websites. The overall purpose of a responsive website must be to allow the users to access & tap different elements of the website hassle-free & seamlessly.
Below are some of the things that you need to ensure accessibility on your mobile website:
- All the important buttons on our website must be tappable within the reach of a user’s thumb.
- Users should not need to use two hands in order to view the information on your website. For example, they should not be required to zoom in or zoom out to view the content of your web pages.
- There shouldn’t be any horizontal scrolling on your mobile website. Just vertical scrolling should be enough.
#7 Loading speed
We all know that the loading speed of a website is very important for better user engagement.
But your website’s loading speed becomes even more crucial in the case of mobile devices.
Why is it so?
Mobile device users have a shorter span of attention as compared to desktop users. It is therefore very important for a responsive website to load in just a couple of seconds.
If your website takes more than 7 seconds to load on mobile devices, it can be an alarming situation for you. In this case, you can consider hiring a website developer to fix the loading speed of your website, especially on mobile devices.
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