5 Reasons Why You Need Responsive Design

Thought A Great Looking Website Was Enough?

Google says, “Think again.” Just when everyone got their latest websites up and running, Google has indicated that there’s more at play here than SEO best practices. Google has been making web-life for companies difficult lately with frequent updates to their search and spam detection algorithms (affectionately known as Penguin and Panda). These updates have actually caused huge financial impact for some companies, demonstrating that companies should take Google’s recommendations seriously.

What is Responsive Design?

Responsive design is the web-design practice of creating different experiences for web visitors unique to each device they use to visit your site. On a desktop, all of the information from your site may be available for those doing research, while on a phone the data is limited to only the critical elements and calls to action or buttons are emphasized to focus users on clicking “buy”.

So, let’s look at the Top 5 Reasons Why You Need Responsive Design.

5. The Intent of Your Visitors

For an eCommerce site, mobile responsive design is a must-have. Studies over the last few years have shown that people have progressively switched to researching deals and products on desktop and laptop computers, but are actually clicking “checkout” on mobile devices like phones and tablets. Creating a unique experience on those platforms that is built to drive users to purchase helps build revenue.

At Synapse, we always recommend responsive design and UX. Both are specialties of ours.

4. Your Future Customer Will be Mobile

Research shows that the average age of the online consumer is only getting younger. Many internet users don’t even know what a pager was, or what a rotary phone looked like, let alone a desktop computer. Most users below the age of 25 have an online engagement of 70% or more from a mobile device – most of which is done in social apps. Plus, mobile technology is being adopted at an unbelievable rate.

Ask yourself this question: If a user clicks on a link from your Facebook page, will they be pinch zooming and be one of the people in the 60%+ mobile bounce rate, or will they be presented with an experience customized for mobile that makes engaging with your brand easy to do?

3. Responsive Is Not Just for the Web

Did you know that 70% of email opens now come from a mobile device? That means people are reading your email marketing on a small screen, and will likely have to pinch-zoom and scroll a lot to read your messages.

At Synapse, we handle massive email advertising campaigns and know how to get email marketing to work right on any device.

2. Benefit from Unified Search Results

For a long time, the best practice for mobile was to purchase and run a mobile domain, which looked like “m.yourdomain.com”, which in and of itself was fine but as CMS (content management systems) have become more prevalent, even for bigger corporate sites, keeping a developer/designer on staff to manage multiple versions of one website has become expensive.

With responsive design the desktop and mobile versions hold exactly the same content, which benefits a company in regards to SERP and avoids the hassle of handling many canonical links covering the bases against duplicate content, which Google doesn’t like. Plus, you only have to manage one website.

CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are no strangers to Synapse. We are also very experienced with PrestaShop and Magento, if you are an eCommerce business. If you didn’t see the story, Synapse recently brought a Magento Certified Developer on-board so we can specialize in Magento eCommerce sites.

1. Last But Not Least – Google is Watching

In case you didn’t see it, Google has been testing many new features with search for mobile devices. A few months ago, Google tested a “non-mobile friendly” icon in search results for sites that were detected not to be equipped with responsive content. Then last month, Google began testing a “mobile-friendly” icon alongside results that had responsive content.

Finally, just a few weeks ago Google added their Site Inspector tool directly into their free Webmaster Tools system to make it easy to test sites for mobile readiness.

It is not currently a ranking factor for Google in regards to SERP, but Google rarely tests this kind of functionality without it eventually affecting search results.

In Closing

Armed with this information, you can see that responsive design is not the wave of the future. It’s here. The wave has already hit the beach and Google is making efforts to ensure, as they always do, that their search results provide “the best user experience.” That means that responsive design for mobile is a must-have.

Get a new site, or upgrade your existing website with a responsive framework today.