Why Every Website Needs to Be Responsive
You have a beautiful website with great navigation and informative content. When people visit your site, you do a pretty good job of getting them to take action. And, you're even optimizing for search engine results, so that when people search for something related to your product or service, it's easy to find your site. Sound like you?
Many businesses meet these website criteria. However, there's one criterion that gets less attention but which is increasingly crucial to business success: mobile-responsiveness.
In simple terms, responsiveness means that when people visit your website on a mobile device, they can view and navigate it with ease.
On a responsive website, there is:
No pinching or pulling to adjust screen size
No excessive scrolling
No difficulty navigating between pages
No image errors
No incomplete design
In other words, the website automatically responds to whichever device a visitor happens to use – be it smartphone, tablet or desktop.
Having a responsive website is no longer about "going the extra mile" to accommodate a niche audience. Rather, it's a must for businesses to stay competitive online. Seventy-one percent of time spent engaging on digital platforms in the U.S. now comes from a mobile device; and, a whopping 62 percent of consumers have used their mobile phones to make a purchase in the last six months. Mobile is where the money's at.
Google actually penalizes websites that aren't mobile responsive. Since their "mobile-geddon" announcement of 2015, Google's search engine ranking algorithm gives more preference to websites that are mobile-friendly. Make your website mobile-friendly and rise in the rankings.
Additionally, when you serve up a poor user experience, your visitors are likely to "bounce" and exit your site in search for another. Not only does a high bounce rate mean you're not engaging potential customers, it also impacts your SEO ranking, as Google's algorithms prioritize sites with low bounce rates.
The good news is that creating a responsive website doesn't mean starting over. Rather, with the help of a design agency or with your in-house development team, relatively simple but significant changes can be made on the back-end of your website to ensure that every visitor can enjoy your website, no matter their device.