What Is a Responsive Website, and Do I Need One?

What is a Respon­sive Site

Have you received emails or been asked by design­ers and mar­keters if your web­site is ​“respon­sive” or has a respon­sive lay­out? Do you won­der what on earth they are talk­ing about and why it mat­ters? In the years ahead, you will con­tin­ue to hear the word ​“respon­sive” used in to describe web­sites, so we all should learn what it means!

A short answer is this: a respon­sive web­site basi­cal­ly responds and adapts to a visitor’s device and screen. So if he or she is view­ing your web­site on an Android 5″ screen, the web­site will resize itself to fit a 5″ screen. There will be no need to pinch to zoom in or out, because the text, forms, links and pic­tures will all be easy to view. Now, if that vis­i­tor decides to search your web­site on a 27″ iMac, the web­site will then respond to the larg­er screen size. To sum­ma­rize, a respon­sive web­site is just one web­site for all devices instead of hav­ing a desk­top and mobile ver­sion. Pre­vi­ous­ly, when a web design­er want­ed to have their web­site be easy for peo­ple to read and respond to on their mobile devices, they would have had to make a mobile web­site. Nor­mal­ly you would see an ​“m” in front of your com­pa­ny URL: i.e. m.yourcompany.com.

Respon­sive on iPhone 6+

Respon­sive on 15″ Macbook

Mobile Site

desk­top site

The prob­lem with hav­ing two web­sites (mobile and desk­top) is that it was/​is hard to update two sites. If you made a copy change or added a new page on your desk­top, you’d have to do the same (man­u­al­ly) on the mobile ver­sion as well. This makes it con­fus­ing for search engines, too. Google in par­tic­u­lar wants to pro­vide the best pos­si­ble search and expe­ri­ence as pos­si­ble for its users.

Do You Need a Respon­sive Website?

Just about all of the web­sites being built today use a respon­sive lay­out. It is now the #1 stan­dard for web design. Google has also been hint­ing to mar­keters that they would pre­fer respon­sive design, and this makes a lot of sense con­sid­er­ing what I men­tioned above: they want a great user expe­ri­ence. So if your web­site is not cur­rent­ly respon­sive and you still have two sep­a­rate web­sites (desk­top and mobile) you def­i­nite­ly need to begin the process of bud­get­ing for an update to your site. It will help, not hin­der, your search results in the long run to have 1 qual­i­ty built respon­sive website.

And if this short post above has not con­vinced you to bud­get for a respon­sive web­site in the very near future, a final word of cau­tion if you let your site stay where it is: Google will soon begin to penal­ize sites that con­tin­ue to have two sep­a­rate sites (mobile and desk­top) or where redi­rect pages do not work prop­er­ly. So play it safe, and do not let your busi­ness site be left behind.