One of the essential components for a website to be successful is to have a responsive web design that is compatible across all devices. And with the rise in multi-device culture, it has become even more crucial to build a responsive web app for every business. Besides, considering the number of people using mobile phones for everything, from purchasing a product to catching up on the latest news, you cannot afford to have a non-responsive website.
Also, if you acknowledge the fact that Google favors mobile-responsiveness as a ranking factor for search engines, it clearly defines the importance of responsiveness. If you’re just starting to build your site or planning to revamp it, here are some useful tips that can help you build a responsive website. But before that, let’s understand what a responsive design and its importance is.
What is Responsive Design?
If you go back a few years, you’ll find yourself using the desktop to surf the web. But time has changed, and technology has evolved. Now, there are multiple ways to access a site using a mobile device, desktop, or tablet. Responsive design is the technique of developing a site that is compatible across all the devices used to access a site.
The primary purpose of a responsive design is to ensure that a consistent user experience is provided across the devices, even if the design looks a little different. Responsive design offers minimal panning, scrolling, zooming, and image optimization. It makes the overall user experience enjoyable for everyone regardless of the device they are using.
Importance of Having a Responsive Web Design
There are thousands of devices used to access a web app or site. Now, developing different versions of a web app for different devices is not a viable choice. Even if you do so, managing them is not practical. Besides, mobile phones have become the primary device for users to access the internet in today’s digital era. So, it is more crucial to build a website that is also responsive across mobile devices.
To better understand the importance of responsive design, let’s have a look at this example. Consider, you’re running a retail shop, and when customers come in to purchase something, you greet them. By offering them an excellent user experience, you can turn them into potential customers.
The same strategy applies to web design. The more enjoyable and user-friendly a website is, the more visitors it will get. To know the importance of responsive design, think about your own experience of browsing the internet. For instance, what would you do if a website takes more than one minute to load? Obviously, you’re going to abandon it and move to another resource.
Besides, it also affects your search engine ranking and online visibility. That’s why having a responsive web design is crucial.
Tips to Design a Responsive Website
Now that you have an understanding of responsive design, let’s begin with the best practices to design a responsive website.
- Analyze What Visitors use to Access your Site
The first thing that you should consider while designing a responsive website is to analyze the devices visitors use to access your site. It is evident that visitors use different devices to access the internet. Some prefer to use mobile devices, while others still rely on desktops to browse the internet.
Now, you can quickly analyze this by surveying your site or using an analytics tool like Google Analytics. And if you realize that mobile devices are used the most, figure out the areas users access the most in your web app. Analyzing this information will allow you to understand what pages need to be more responsive on the smaller screens.
- Use Media Queries and Breakpoints
Media queries and breakpoints are often overlooked by designers while developing a website. But these two elements can improve your web app responsiveness easily without much effort. Media queries help optimize the website layout according to various screen widths. This allows the web content to respond to different conditions on multiple devices while enabling the media query to check for the width. It even optimizes the resolution and orientation of the devices being used to access the site.
Media queries use a specific rule – @media to add a CSS block to the web page if the particular condition holds true. Also, it is helpful in excluding some aspects if the screen size is lesser than the desired width. Moreover, you can introduce breakpoints to the different parts of the site to make it more mobile optimized.
- Use Grids instead of Pixels and Inches
Most business website designs are often based on the fixed pixel size, which frequently fluctuates the web app’s responsiveness. However, using fluid grids will allow you to expand the web pages in liquid layouts. The web elements can be sized proportionately with the grid instead of limiting it to a particular size.
Fluid grids have the capability to fix the site pixels and inches based on the screen size and dimensions. Grids are based on proportions, which allow all the web elements to readjust as per the device requirements. Fluid grids can do half of the work to make your site responsive, but if the browser window is too small, it won’t help much. And that’s where media queries play a vital role.
- Optimize the Images
Pictures are an essential part of a web app, especially for e-commerce applications; they keep the users engaged for a longer time. Using images on your web app allows visitors to visualize the products and make an emotional connection with them. But, using high pixel images can affect the responsiveness of your web app. Thus, optimizing the web images is crucial to maintain the responsiveness of the website.
To optimize the web images, you need to save them in the appropriate format for different categories, such as JPG for scenic pictures and PNG for icons and logos. Moreover, you also need to reduce the image size with photo editing tools to optimize them for mobile devices. You can also create rules in your CSS to determine how images are handled on different screens.
- Improve Website Speed
Page loading speed has always been a primary factor in providing a better user experience. It has become a ranking factor as per the latest Google algorithms. Thus, improving the page loading speed of your web app is very crucial for businesses. However, when it comes to improving the speed of a site, there are some things that you need to consider, such as content creation, page structure, content structure, viewpoint, styling, the width of the design, and text size.
These parts play a vital role in building a responsive website, and they need to be organized and adjust accordingly. To improve the page speed, you need to perform continuous testing and check the web pages take more than usual to load.
- Manage the Site Navigation
Another essential factor for a responsive design is the site navigation used by the visitors to access various sections of your site. Navigation serves as a roadmap that enables visitors to access other pages on the site easily. Although the navigation can easily be optimized on desktops, managing it over small screens like mobile becomes a little complicated. And as mobiles are becoming the first choice of users to access the internet, driving the optimization for it is crucial.
Instead of keeping complicated navigation for mobile versions, you should follow a simplistic approach. For instance, keeping the most crucial menu items visible on the top will make it easier for the users to access your site. Moreover, you can also use the hamburger menu for the remaining web links.
- Take a Look at the Responsive Typography
Typography plays a vigorous role in enhancing the responsiveness of a website. While designing the various elements of your web app, be sure to scale the font size, line-height, and the web pages’ width so they can fit different screens well. Using large fonts will allow you to improve the readability of the users. To scale the images, you can use a range of 16px and adjust them accordingly.
Besides, if you want to improve the text, don’t forget to use a legible font, as script fonts are not user-friendly. But you have to be careful about the line-height because using much line-height can spread the texts in space. Thus, try to maintain a specific range for the reader to keep it visually better.
The above tips can help you develop a responsive web design that is friendly across all devices. However, it is recommended to test the responsiveness of your site whenever new changes are implemented. There are plenty of tools available in the market that can be used to test the mobile responsiveness of your site.
For example, the LT Browser from LambdaTest is an excellent tool that can be utilized to check your site’s mobile responsiveness. It even allows you to test your locally hosted websites across more than 45+ mobile, desktop devices and browsers.
Final Words
Building a responsive design is a critical requirement for every business, especially if you offer any products or services. Most companies often don’t consider it a relevant factor for business success, but with the recent changes in the digital environment, having a responsive website is essential to growing your business. However, building a responsive website requires adequate knowledge of the factors that can affect it. In this article, we discussed seven practical tips that can help you build a responsive website.
