With the staggering growth of mobile devices like smart phones and tablets, and mobile device usage, via games, apps, social media, and websites, it is now essential that your business website is mobile friendly, so that your clients and prospects can easily browse and find information, regardless of what type of device (phone, tablet, desktop, etc.) they are using.
In this post, we explain why having a responsive website is so critical to your marketing as well as some key considerations to keep in mind when designing a responsive website.
1) Mobile Usage Is On The Rise
Currently, more than 58% of adults own a smartphone and almost 60% of all website traffic is from mobile devices. In fact, there are currently more mobile devices on earth then their are people. And every month mobile usage continues to grow, so every month more and more prospects and customers will view your website from a mobile device. If their experience viewing and interacting with your site is poor, they’ll likely have a lower option of your brand, and they’ll also be more likely to visit a competitor’s site.
2) Positive user experience is a must.
According to Google’s Think Insights on mobile, if a user lands on your mobile website and is frustrated or doesn’t see what they are looking for, there’s a 61% chance they will leave immediately and go to another website (most likely a competitor). It’s also said that if they have a positive experience with your mobile website, a user is 67% more likely to buy a product or use a service.
3) Shopping On Mobile Devices Is Steadily Growing
Online shopping is easier than hopping in the car and driving to the store and it is even easier if you can do it in your favorite chair, while watching TV. 80% of consumers regularly use their smartphones to shop online. And 70% of shoppers now use mobile phones while in stores during the holidays. If your products and services aren’t easy to view from a phone, you’re missing out on an opportunity.
4) Search Engine Optimization
Google, being the search engine giant, pretty much dictates what needs to be done for search engine optimization. In its numerous suggestions on how to gain high rankings, one of the important ones is the use of responsive website design. Google has clearly indicated that it prefers responsive designs to the mobile templates. The use of a single URL with the responsive design makes it easy for the search engine robots to crawl and index the website. This also helps greatly in reducing the on-page search engine optimization errors.
5) Blogging and social activities bring mobile visitors.
If you’re like most inbound marketers and have elements of blogging and social media incorporated in your strategy, you probably have been seeing increased mobile traffic. A recent study by ComScore cites that 55% of social media consumption happens on a mobile device.
With that being said, if you’re sharing out content links or links to your website and don’t have a mobile-friendly website, you’re not only going to experience high bounce rates and low conversion rates, but also a frustrated audience.
6) Easier Long Term Maintenance
A responsive website designed page is much easier to maintain than the mobile versions of the main websites. This is because the smart devices are updated at instant speed. This means that the mobile version of the websites would need to be updated at an equally fast pace if the mobile site is to work on these devices. This makes the maintenance of a mobile site not only tiresome, but also expensive. A slight lack of update in the website can harm the business by increasing the bounce rate. This is why the responsive website design is a suitable option for the fast-paced tech development.
7) Responsive adapts to future devices.
One of the big benefits of responsive design is that the size of the template is designed based on screen size, not device. This means that no matter what size screen someone is viewing your website, it will display properly for that screen size.
So, in the future, as new devices (TVs, watches, glasses, etc.) are being used for web browsing, your responsive site will still look beautiful.
Moving forward, it will be extremely critical that your website provides mobile users an easy-to-use experience. Having a mobile website is no longer simply a nice feature — rather, it is now a necessity and literally impacts the growth of your business.
8) Invest Now To Save Later
If you’re smart or want to act smart – you should think about saving money later by investing on the designers now. That’s why it’s the most imoprtant reason why you should invest on developing a responsive website.
The concept of responsive web designing (RWD) is going to be rival in near future and it’ll take a lot more money to hire and RWD-expert then.
