A responsive website alters the layout to provide an experience on the basis of the device being utilized, especially suited for mobile display.
A mobile responsive website contains design elements like:
- Readable text without needing a zoom
- Absence of horizontal scrolling
- Sufficient room for tap targets
Websites that are not optimized for all such smaller screens can witness a decrease in their search engine rankings. This implies that they are not becoming found online.
The fact is that above 60% of searches online presently arise from a mobile device.
To ensure your website provides an experience custom-made to handheld devices (without building a separate app), think why responsive design is essential as a mobile solution.
Responsive web design (RWD) develops a system for a sole site to react to the size of a user’s device – having one URL and a single content source. A responsive website possesses a fluid and flexible arrangement which modifies as per screen size.
Its importance is that it provides an optimized browsing experience.
Primarily, your website will appear great and work nicely on a desktop (or laptop), a mobile phone’s browser, and a tablet.
Advantages Of Mobile Responsive Design
The prime benefit of a responsive layout is the assurance that any user on any device will undergo the finest experience possible on your website. Besides, the most consistent.
Website responsiveness is even an excellent way to refine the content on your site, ensuring that people employing a mobile device are only viewing the most important information.
The Google algorithm update enables a responsive web design to increase visibility on search engines – since it is mobile-friendly. A site having an effective mobile experience will display in the search results above one without.
The Importance Of Responsive Design For Business
- A consistent experience that can raise sales, lead generation and conversions
- Increase reach to clients and customers on smaller devices (smartphones & tablets)
- Analytics, reporting, and tracking can all be at one place
- Time and cost on-site content management is reduced
- Lead the competition (even 44% of Fortune 500 companies are not mobile-ready at present).
Other benefits include mobile use and development, better page quality, and website SEO.
Multipurpose Vs Niche Themes – Which One Best Serves Your Project
Sidebars, themes, categories, permalinks, tags, plugins, widgets – looking at all such terms can give you a headache when you’re a starter. Certainly, these terms appear cool, whose meanings are evident to developers, while it looks that WordPress wouldn’t carry similar exponential expansion in the absence of these.
The distinction between multipurpose and niche themes isn’t defined in stone, while there aren’t any guidelines to effect an obvious distinction between multipurpose and niche ones.
This being mentioned, niche themes are intended to be employed for a unique field – there exist niche themes concerning schools, charity projects, events, DJs, churches, etc. Such themes are equipped with features that are handy mostly for the particular type of project. Finally, a niche theme must be used mainly – if not solely – for a particular purpose.
For example, simply viewing the library of ThemeIsle’s, LawyeriaX signifies a theme aimed for attorneys, whereas Yoga is intended for yoga gyms and instructors.
Multipurpose themes can adapt to any type of project: portfolios, blogs, business projects, magazine news, online shops, besides others.
Zelle Pro denotes a multipurpose ThemeIsle theme that has cast its mark upon the web, which is now recognized by numerous users. Another instance, Divi, the flagship theme of Elegant Themes, and it’s among the most utilized WordPress themes in the market. Finally, Avada is a multipurpose theme that has been relied on by nearly 250,000 clients till now.
These themes don’t lack any particular feature, you have everything at your side to design an awesome WordPress website! Undoubtedly, such multipurpose themes constitute among the most sophisticated tools permitting you to design websites without entering a single row of code.
Ensure Your Plugins Follow Responsive Design
Merely selecting a responsive WordPress theme is not enough. You need to ensure that every single plugin you install also functions on responsive design principles.
For instance, if you install a plugin that inserts a contact form to your WordPress site, you better ensure that the contact form appears great on mobile as well as desktop.
Sadly, there’s not actually an automated test for this one. Rather, you’ll need to manually examine whenever you install a fresh plugin.
You can either:
Use your individual smartphone to view how the plugin appears on mobile
Utilize a site such as Am I Responsive to view how the plugin operates against various different devices
Employ your browser’s Developer Tools functionality
Plugins impart functionality to your WordPress site, so they don’t always include anything to the front-end. But in case they do insert a physical element to your site (like a CTA button or a widget) ensure it scales nicely on all screen sizes or at least offers you the option to disable it on smaller screen sizes.
A sidebar widget is a beautiful addition to a desktop site, but if it overwhelms the mobile design or doesn’t scale down, it’s not going to provide a great user experience.
Integrating Google AMP For WordPress
Google AMP signifies Accelerated Mobile Pages. This constitutes an open-source endeavor promoted by technology firms such as Twitter and Google. The aim of the initiative is to speed up the loading of web content for mobile customers.
For numerous mobile users, studying on the web is frequently slow. The majority of content laden pages need several seconds for loading despite all attempts made by site handlers to accelerate their website.
AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages utilizes bare least HTML and restricted Javascript. This permits the hosting of content on the Cache of Google AMP. Google can thereby offer this cached model to users immediately when they select your link within the search outcomes.
It largely resembles Instant Articles of Facebook. Nevertheless, Instant Articles are restricted simply to the platform of Facebook, more particularly to their mobile application.
Accelerated Mobile Pages are platform-doubter and may be utilized by any browser, app, or web watcher. At present, it is utilized by Twitter, Google, Reddit, LinkedIn, besides others.
Advantages Of Google AMP
- AMP is free and open-source
- AMP can certainly better the load times of your WordPress site. Keep in mind that speed is a ranking feature
- Improved placements in SERPs with carousel probability for better CTR. One implementation with a recognized publisher led
- Google AMP to register 600% in CTR!
- Google AMP compels plenty of suggested web performance practices like avoidance of big CSS and JS frameworks
- Could affect your conversions in a positive way
- Plenty of improvements have been done over the previous year and advertising choices are now easily available in Google
- AMP. This implies magazines and the latest publications can keep or even raise their AdSense revenue.
- Automatic image optimization (also conversion to WebP format!)
- AMP Lite initiates further optimization for slow network connections
- Google witnessed a mixed 45% decrease in bytes.
Wrapping Things Up
Responsive design permits you to remain ahead of the trend. As the need for media-filled mobile internet and apps is booming, several major implications must be addressed; maintenance and development costs, improved conversion rates, visibility in search engines. It is these factors mixed with a unified approach to design that will be advantageous for all stakeholders.
With the rise in Tablet sales and smartphone device use exploding, responsive design is core to staying ahead of your rivals and building market share.
