Responsive web design is a website’s ability to automatically reformat itself to adapt to the screen size of any device. The purpose of responsive web design is to maximise user experience and attract a favourable result with Google rankings.
How responsive web design works
Instead of using pixels, responsive web design uses proportion to size its elements. For instance, if a page has four columns their width would be dictated by how wide they should be in relation to the other columns. Column 1 is half a page, column 2 takes up 20% and column 3 takes up 30%. Resizing is relative, including images, so all elements resize themselves depending on the size of the screen.
Is a responsive website the same as a mobile-friendly website?
No, they are not the same. A mobile-friendly website is designed to look great on mobile devices, but becomes unstable and difficult to navigate when viewed with higher resolution. A responsive website can be viewed on any device including desktop, phone and tablet with no difference in appearance. This is particularly important when searching for items that you may need to contract into your business such as a hydraulic winch like the ones you can find at https://www.brevini.co.uk/power-transmission/winches/hydraulic-winches/
Mobile optimisation
While we are all aware of the increase in mobile phone usage to browse the internet, a closer look at research figures reveals an astonishing surge in user activity. 4G availability saw an incredible increase from 2.7 million users to 23.6 million users in 2014.
It is vital your website is optimised for mobile devices so you can take advantage of the massive amounts of traffic trawling the internet looking for businesses like yours. If visitors have a positive experience browsing your website, they are more likely to return. And if that’s not enough to convince you, experts recently revealed mobile device traffic outnumbered desktop traffic visiting retail websites for the first time.
Check your traffic
A good experiment to put things in perspective is observe where your website traffic originates. You can do this easily through Google Analytics by selecting ‘audience’ and ‘mobile’. You will be able to see the number of visitors originating from mobile devices and, if you really want to be specific, you can ask Google to tell you which mobile devices in particular.
