Remember when you had to resize and zoom in constantly to read information or to click a link when you’re browsing a website on your phone? These days, website visitors have high expectations and if your website fails to give them what they’re looking for within a few seconds, you’ve probably lost them.
Therefore, having a well optimised website that integrates responsive design is the key to holding the visitors’ attention, winning them over in just a few clicks, and converting more sales.
What Is Responsive Design?
Responsive design is essentially a collection of design optimisation techniques that allows a website to automatically scale content and web elements to match the screen size on which it is viewed from. By doing this, unnecessary resizing, scrolling, zooming, or panning that occurs with websites that have not been optimised for different devices can be avoided.
Additionally, responsive website design also replaces the need for multiple dedicated mobile website designs for different smartphone screens previously. This leads to easy navigation of websites as well as consistency maintenance between big desktop layouts and small mobile layouts.
Here’s a list of benefits on why offering a responsive design experience tailored to handheld devices is important for your website visitors.
1. SEO Ranking
Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is a strategy employed by brands to help boost themselves in Google’s search engine results rankings. Responsive design helps tremendously with SEO because Google gives preference to websites that are mobile-friendly. This allows your website to be closer to the top, improving the chance potential website visitors finding you.
2. Cost-Effective
Developing a responsive web design might be an expensive matter initially, but in the long run it will prove to be cost effective from all aspects as it eliminates the need for having multiple website designs. By offering a fluid one-size-fits-all design solution, it also saves you from investing time and additional funds in maintaining all versions up-to-date with the latest changes constantly.
3. Reduced Bounce Rate
Shopping on smartphones is increasingly becoming a norm these days and if your website can’t keep your visitors engaged and spending more time exploring your store, the likelihood of them bouncing to a different website increases. Hence, building a responsive and completely optimised mobile website is key to an improved user experience and a higher ROI rate.
4. Establishing Credibility
When you highlight the same website elements across various platforms, it consistently reaffirms the message you’re trying to send across to your website visitors. Therefore, uniformity of digital content, design, and products across different devices help in establishing credibility.
The importance of mobile website design is being emphasised constantly but many ECommerce brands still utilise website designs that can be accessed smoothly on desktop but do not offer a good experience when browsing on mobile. To gain an edge over your competitors and don’t have the budget yet to create an interactive app, switching to a website employing responsive design is then a good start.
Whether you’re launching your first ECommerce website or looking to switch up your website design, we’re your team. With our expertise in ECommerce web design & development, we can create a website that’s sure to create a great experience across any device tailored to your specific needs. Simply reach out to us by contacting our sales representatives to start the conversation!
