The Responsive Web Designs have numerous benefits for businesses. It helps you target your potential customers from across the globe through different devices. With RWD, you do not need to maintain multiple URLs for multiple sites.
A responsive website adjusts itself according to the viewer, irrespective of the device model, screen size, specifications, and configurations.
With Responsive Web Design posing as the next big thing, let’s ponder upon the number of ways your business can get benefits from it:
1. Drive More Mobile Users to Your Business
Mobile and Tablet users outnumbered desktop users for the first time, back in late 2016 and since then, there’s no looking back, handheld devices continue to rule the web with their growing market presence.
With responsive websites’ ability to adjust their content according to different screen sizes and viewports, they provide you with the best opportunity to reach a large number of potential customers.
This will help you make your presence among the consumers, driving more traffic to your site, leading to increased brand recognition and sales.
2. Save Your Development Cost
Building multiple codebases and hosting multiple URLs require huge chunks of money. Whereas, adopting a Responsive Web Design approach saves a significant part of your total business investment.
Unlike, adaptive or non-responsive websites, responsive websites have a single codebase with optimised styling sheets that adjust themselves according to different devices, resolutions, and specifications, thus saving the development costs for your business.
3. Increase Conversion Rate of Your Website
Responsive websites allow you to serve your customers with content that is consistent across platforms. Be it desktops, laptops, tablets or mobile phones, the look and the feel of the site remains same.
As the customer gets to see the same content, elements, and visuals, rather than the device or browser-specific content, on any device he accesses, he does not need to figure out the location of a certain element on a certain device.
This consistency of content across platforms and devices enhances the User Experience of your site, helping in reaching out to and attracting new customers.
This leads to an increased conversion rate and provides you with an edge over your competitors with low User Experience.
4. Get Your Business Boosted by Google
Google is built for users – to provide users with an easy and clutter-free platform to surf the web; it explores and analyses its consumer behaviour and changes its search and SEO ranking algorithms accordingly.
With people spending more time on mobile phones and tablets, mobile phones account for more than fifty per cent of the total web traffic generated worldwide.
Seeing this new drift of users towards mobile, Google changed its algorithms and prefers user-friendliness over all other factors.
It strongly recommends responsive web designs that automatically adjust themselves according to the users’ viewing environment, whether desktop, laptop, tablets or mobile phones, so as to provide the users with a seamless user experience that is consistent over all platforms.
Getting a responsive website for your business, not only places your business in Google’s good books but, also provides you with ample opportunities to connect with your customers better.
5. Improve Mobile Search Engine Visibility
The search engine visibility of your business website depends on your SEO activities and how your business site appears in Google SERPs.
While, there’s no defined criteria, algorithm or set of points on which your site gets evaluated. Google is reported to change its search algorithms around 600 times in a year, that is, close to changing twice a day. There are some factors like response time, mobile friendliness, bounce rate, social acceptance and duplicity that always remain in Google’s priority list.
People are moving towards mobile technology; according to Statista, more than fifty per cent of the total internet traffic generated comes from mobile phones.
Percentages of all web pages served to mobile phone globally
Adopting an RWD approach can improve your search engine ranking remarkably.
Responsive Websites offer all these prefered factors for an enhanced SEO ranking; these websites can change their code elements, content and audios/visuals embedded according to the viewing environment, reducing the response time significantly. Since these can adapt to a wide range of varying mobile handsets, they tend to be more mobile friendly.
Content duplicity arises when the same content is available on different URLs; while responsive sites do not maintain multiple URLs, they rule out this possibility.
6. Create More Revenue Streams for Business
Responsive websites have the flexibility to adapt and adjust to any viewing environment, provide enhanced visibility to your site and increase your conversion rate. The more consumer-friendly your site becomes, more will be the chances to stand out from the competition, leading to the generation of more revenue for your business.
Responsive websites allow you to leverage social media benefits, with their dominating presence among the desktop and mobile social spaces.
7. Reduce Maintenance and Support Costs
While, choosing the responsive design approach over adaptive ones might appear a bit expensive initially, but, in the long run, responsive websites help you reduce huge chunks of recurring maintenance costs.
In case of responsive web design, if there’s ever a break in your website’s code, all you need to do is, develop, test, and release patches for a single URL.
Whereas for adaptive websites, this process could be highly time-consuming; you will have to figure out the device and its corresponding codebase first, and then look for the break, develop a patch, and test on all the devices that the codebase supports separately.
Also, making responsive websites adapt to the latest technologies is more cost effective, in comparison to its other market counterparts, lowering support costs of your website significantly.
8. Get Enhanced Social Media Coverage
With around sixty-one percent of the total social media activity takes place through the mobile web. It is imperative that you optimise your business according to mobile social media.
Responsive websites’ ability to adapt to varying device specifications, offers a perfect way to establish a remarkable social media presence for your business.
With just a single URL, you do not have to worry about your site going erratic on users’ devices, the site will work fine, irrespective of the device. This eases shareability, you do not have to share multiple URLs for multiple platform users, like for desktop users, www.exampledesktop.com, and for mobile users, www.examplemobile.com.
9. Increases Credibility of Your Business Website
While you might be working to improve your website metrics, bounce rate is surely not the one to be increased.
Bounce Rate tells you the percentage of people who visit your website, have a look and then exit it immediately, that is, their entry and exit happen through the same webpage; this is possibly either they are not the right visitors or, they are not provided with a good user experience.
High bounce rates send your consumers away from you, hampering your SEO Rankings, traffic, and eventually your revenue.
Responsive websites contribute to lower the bounce rate by adjusting content according to the viewer’s device. You can optimize your site’s content for different platforms and prevent it from going haywire on smaller devices.
You can add multiple paragraphs describing your services on desktops, while at the same time, design mobile stylesheets that automatically changes the content, font types and sizes and loads compressed images.
RWD approach offers a seamless user experience and provides a personalized and consistent feel, across platforms. This builds trust among your consumers, and as a result, they spend more time on your website, increasing the credibility of your business.
10. Generate Quality Backlinks for Your Website
The next important thing, that helps a business with online presence go viral, is quality backlinks.
The reason for generating credible backlinks is, “The more backlinks you have pointing back to your site, the more popular it will be”, and this works the other way round too, “The more popular you are, more backlinks you will have pointing back to your site”.
Responsive websites with their mobile responsiveness, low bounce rate, effective social media networking, reduced response time, builds credibility and authority among your peers and consumers, helping you to generate quality backlinks.
Future of Responsive Web Design
Today, businesses are completely driven by technology and customer experience. What started as “More, Cheaper, Better” decades ago, has evolved into “Personalized, Intelligent, and Now”.
From shopping from brick and mortar stores to visualising shopping centres’ aisles using apps, the retail industry evolved significantly over the years.
Today, your buyers can browse product catalogues, place an order and track them in real-time according to their comfort and choice.
But, What’s Next?
A web that completely transforms itself according to consumer needs, their interests and requirements, content presented, queries asked, all by itself. Fully automated, no outside human intervention.
Probably, that’s where lies the future of web design, a Virtual Reality, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence enabled Web, which will analyse the accumulated data, which will further allow people to view product catalogues, have a realistic feel and experience products, according to their needs and interests.
While these technologies enabled web is still in its rudimentary phase, it won’t take much longer to the human mind to define the next milestone and raise the bars high.
