Responsive design is a huge deal, and it’s only getting bigger. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re missing out on a lot of traffic. But how do you know if your site is responsive? And what can you do to make sure it stays that way?
Prioritizing responsive web design is one of the easiest ways to entice your site visitors to stay longer. It is a technique for creating websites that automatically adjust to the screen size of your users.
Many website issues can be resolved with responsive design. It makes your website mobile-friendly, enhances how it appears on both large and small screens, and increases the time visitors spend there. It can even help in raising your search engine ranks.
What is a responsive web design?
Responsive web design is crucial in the modern day. It focuses on adjusting the web page’s size to fit the viewport (or screen size) used to view the website. If you want your site visitors to enjoy their time and experience, you’ll need to consider not only how the images and text are placed, but also the font sizes.
For proper responsiveness, you need to assign font sizes to every device, whether tablet, laptop, or mobile phones
For instance, if you use a 10px font on a larger screen size and reduce it to 6px for mobile devices, the words can become unreadable.
On a smaller screen, the font size must be larger; 16 px is the suggested size. The ideal font sizes for mobile devices are 16px and 8px.
The best responsive websites use fluid grids, stretchable images, and CSS style to change the site’s design and present it in line with the browser’s width. Designers aim to fix a website’s UI and UX across various devices and platforms.
Techniques for a responsive web design
To create a responsive web design, website designers employ a variety of techniques. The following are crucial skills and artistry.
The viewport
A meta viewport tag is placed in the document’s head for pages responsive to different screen sizes. It instructs the browser how to adjust the page’s size and scale.
Mobile browsers use the website with a desktop screen width (mostly around 980px) to get the best user experience.
They attempt to improve the content’s appearance by enlarging the font sizes and scaling the content to fit the screen. Users may see irregular font sizes and need to double-tap or click zoom to view and engage the page.
The meta viewport informs the page to resize its width to match the screen’s width. A device-independent pixel enables the page’s content to reflow to fit various screen sizes, whether it is displayed on a smaller mobile phone or a huge desktop monitor.
Website users are used to browsing webpages vertically on desktop computers and mobile devices, but not horizontally. Forcing the user to zoom out or scroll horizontally to view the entire page leads to a bad user experience.
It’s simple to mistakenly create page content that doesn’t exactly fit into the intended viewport when designing a mobile site with a meta viewport tag.
If an image is shown at a width more significant than the viewport, you should avoid forcing the user to scroll horizontally or resize this content to fit the viewport’s width.
Image
A scrollbar will appear if an image’s fixed dimensions are bigger than the viewport. The solution to this issue is to set the maximum width for all pictures to 100%.
If the viewport size is smaller than the picture, the image will be shrunk to suit the available space. The image will only expand as much as its actual size since the maximum width is 100%.
The width and height properties of your image should be fixed when using max-width(100%) to change the image’s natural size. This is to ensure that layout changes brought on by new content uploading may be avoided.
Modern browsers use this information to reserve space for their picture before it is uploaded.
Layout
Flexible grids are more accessible to create due to modern CSS layout tools like Flexbox, Grid Layout, and Multicol. Layout styles include;
Flexbox
This layout style is appropriate if you want a group of things of various sizes to fit easily in a row or rows, with smaller items taking up less space and larger ones taking up more.
Flexbox allows you to present items as a single row or wrapped into several rows when the available space is reduced in a responsive design.
CSS Grid
CSS Grid Layout is used for the creation of flexible grids. Instead of using fixed pixels, it uses a website layout design on percentage values.
Multicol
Multiple-column layouts (Multicol) are used to build various layout classes of columns using the column-width property. It is a layout specification that groups content into a set of boxes, just as we see in newspapers and some magazines.
This kind of layout is easier to resize or rearrange depending on the screen used to view the website.
Google Resizer
One way to increase your RQ is by using Google Resizer. This tool helps you optimize your site for mobile devices by resizing the page, so you can see how it will look on different screens.
It’s easy: just enter your site URL into the box and hit “Resize”.
Media queries
When your site is developed, media queries will be implemented as a form of code. Including it in your code is important since it creates the framework for the design to automatically resize itself to fit the screen.
Web browser
The best tool for a web design preview is your web browser, although it can seem like an obvious choice. You should install a variety of browsers to receive a wide range of opinions when it comes to gauging how responsive your site is on those platforms.
Benefits of a responsive web design
We touched on this a bit, but here are the main merits you enjoy when you put in the effort to make your site responsive;
Cost-effectiveness
It can be expensive to maintain different websites for your mobile and non-mobile devices. Responsive design allows you to save money by doing away with the need to pay for a mobile site. For your website to appeal to all visitors and devices, one design investment is sufficient.
Flexibility
A responsive web design makes it simple and quick to make modifications. This flexibility is very beneficial when you want to do a quick design change or correct a typo on your website.
Improved user experience
Websites owners focus on user experience. To encourage visitors to return, you want them to like your website and find it simple. Your business would look unprofessional if someone views your website on a mobile device and it takes forever to load or if the photos have a bad resolution.
Responsive design provides a better user experience. Content can be viewed more quickly and visitors will have a more favorable impression of the site because zooming and scrolling will no longer be necessary.
SEO benefits
Many businesses use search engine optimization, or SEO to improve their placement on Google’s search results pages. This will make clients and visitors easily locate you.
Responsive design can assist with SEO because Google prefers mobile-friendly websites. This can significantly improve your ranking on search engines.
Easy to manage
Responsive web design enables you to make adjustments yourself which is fast and easy. Managing other aspects of your marketing is quite simple.
You can link mobile or desktop sites on social media updates and redirect links to get the right visitors. The management of a business website is significantly less stressful when it is responsive.
Conclusion
Responsive web design or a high responsive quotient has lots of benefits to your online business and your brand in general. It rewards you with google rankings, a happy customer experience with your website, and a lot of ease and flexibility when managing your website.
If you are unable to create one for yourself, you should get in touch with a professional web designer who can help you out. The price is not a concern. The cost of making one is relatively cheap, and the merits are enormous.
