Responsive web design is basically designing a website to shift the visual layout of the website sections, based on the size of the screen the website is being viewed on. A website on a mobile device should look differnet than when it is viewed on a desktop.
This type of design is essential for modern websites and if your site doesn’t look good on phones to tablets you need to contact a web developer to make it so! The majority of site visitors are now from mobile devices. In 2020 68% of all site visits were from mobile devices. This is dependent on the industry of course.
Using a website builder such as WordPress usually means that your site will be responsive straight out of the box, however, some mistakes can be made when a web developer only checks the site on their desktop device when building, rather than across multiple screen sizes.
Check Mobile Responsiveness
If you want to check how your site performs on mobiles or tablets, you can right click on your website and click ‘inspect’ or ‘inspect element’ and you will see a mobile style icon in one of the corners (this changes on Chroome and Firefox). This is an emulator, showing you what the site would look like on a particular device.
Problems When Your Site Isn’t Responsive
Google now ranks sites using a ‘Google first’ method. This means that Google will check your site on how it appears on a mobile device before the desktop version.
When a site isn’t mobile responsive, it simply shrinks to fit into the screen size. This can cause issues with buttons, menu tapping and readability.
Buttons
Areas that are clickable on your page – such as buttons can easily be mistakenly tapped if the space around them is too small. On mobiles, the buttons should be large and not be mistakenly clicked by accident.
Text too small to read
If a website is reduced in size to fit a mobile screen, the font size is shrunk to a level where a person has to zoom in to read it. This would mean having to navigate the screen left and right to read the whole text. Any mobile website where you have to do this will perform lower than an equivalent website that is done properly.
Any website experience that is not simple will reduce the trust and reputation of the website leading to visitors leaving the site. A responsive website will display the font in an easy to read way – without having to scroll sideways to read.
If you have concerns about your mobile responsiveness, please get in touch with us and see how we can help.