Google changed their algorithm to include mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal (affectionately nicknamed Mobilegeddon) back in 2015, which, for us, was enough in itself to explain the importance of responsiveness.
But if you’re still unclear on what the benefits are, let’s dive in...
Enhanced user experience
I’d argue that the main reason you should have a responsive website is user experience (UX). You want to offer your customers a great experience in-store or in person, so that sentiment should extend to your website too.
Often, on an unresponsive site, you can run into problems with the text being difficult to read, requiring users to zoom in and scroll horizontally just to read your content. Or links and buttons may be too small to click, meaning that your visitors might not always be able to convert - even if they want to.
These scenarios are not providing the seamless UX that mobile users now expect from the sites they visit, which might be a costly problem for you. While the individual issues may seem quite small, they could be seriously damaging your conversion rate.
And when you consider that over 60% of searches come from mobile, having a website that is specifically designed to adapt to different screen sizes and enable an easy customer journey seems like the natural choice.
Why not a separate mobile site?
This is a question we hear a lot - why should you choose responsive design over a separate mobile site? And it’s understandable. Mobile sites are fine. And, historically, as mobile usage increased, a lot of companies were building supplementary mobile sites to sit alongside their ‘main’ websites.
But the idea that mobile sites are secondary to desktop isn’t how we like to approach development - and Google have even cited responsive design as their recommended design pattern. However, there are a few more reasons why we recommend building a responsive website over a separate mobile site:
Easier to manage: This is more of an advantage for you than your customers, but it can be a big one. If your mobile site is separate, whenever you want to create a new page or make changes to your existing content, you’ll need to spend more time updating everything twice. Add to this submitting two separate sitemaps to search engines and monitoring analytics on two separate accounts and it can become a chore. A responsive site means you only need to do each thing once, making managing and updating your website much easier.
Google's mobile-first index: Introduced earlier this year, Google’s mobile-first index is, essentially, exactly how it sounds. Up until now, Google typically used the desktop version of a site for indexing and ranking, but to better meet the needs of their, primarily mobile, users, that’s all changed. Google will now primarily use the mobile version of a website for indexing.
Of course, if there is no mobile version, the desktop version will be indexed. But with the announcement that search results will show URLs that are most appropriate for the device a user is using, it’s probably safe to assume that if you don’t have a mobile-friendly site, it could negatively impact your search rankings in favour of other websites that offer a better mobile experience.
For more information, you can read Google’s best practices for mobile-first indexing here.Consistency: Digital strategy is all about an omnichannel approach now. Users move freely between devices, so there’s a good chance that they’ll see your website on two or more different devices at some point (maybe all in one day). When they do, a responsive website will ensure that they receive a consistent brand experience at each visit.
Responsive design will also ensure consistency in content. As mentioned above, because it would require you to update and manage multiple sites, having a separate mobile site can mean more potential for inconsistencies in text and images, meaning that your customers may find different (or outdated) information when they visit your website on different devices.
