Responsive web design and its benefits
Introduction
Creating a good website does not mean only offering an appealing design, providing comfortable navigation for users, or writing clean code. Today’s digital space requires something more: to make it possible for users to access and navigate websites on different ranges of devices, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, or desktops. How is it possible? By using responsive web design. Let’s have a look at how it can be achieved and what are the benefits of making a web project responsive.
Flexibility and automatic adaptation to various devices
The first benefit of the responsive design is the flexibility of the layouts to automatically adapt to various devices' screen sizes. This means that all the content including images, fonts, or other elements should fit any user's device. To achieve this is possible by using: Media queries in CSS allow the creation of different layouts depending on the size of the viewport. Media queries are defined with the @media rule with the CSS rules inside the curly braces: @media () { // CSS rules } freecodecamp.org Media queries are based on breakpoints, which are the points defined in the code. All the elements of the website content respond to these points and adjust themselves to the viewport/screen size layout.
The most commonly used breakpoints across the devices' screens according to the Statcounter are : 1920x1080 - 9.34% 360x800 - 6.67% 1366x768 - 6.62% 1536x864 -4.37% 390x844 - 4.02% 414x896 - 3.38%
Another way to make the website responsive is to use special frameworks such as Bootstrap, Materialize, Bulma, and others. Based on ready-made components they make responsive web development faster and easier.
Advanced User Experience
The second benefit of using responsive design is the enhanced User Experience. The problem with non-responsive websites is that they fail to display accurately the content across the devices. For example, the appealing design on a desktop can turn into a total mess on a mobile or tablet screen: the layout might be destroyed, the content elements or the fonts might be too small or too big, the images might have a wrong resolution, etc. As a result, the website looks unprofessional, which can affect the company’s reputation, and in this case, the visitors probably will never come back again to the website. Using the responsive approach, on the opposite, will automatically reorganize the content across different devices providing a positive experience for users and increasing their engagement.
Enhanced SEO performance
Another benefit of applying the responsive design is making the websites more “attractive” for search engines, for ex., Google. This means that a responsive website will have a higher search rank among other websites, that in its turn enhances the visibility or organic traffic. This criterion is especially crucial if a website is the main driving force for a business.
“Responsive” means “efficient”
It is obvious, that creating multiple versions of a website for various devices would consume more time and effort from a web development team. In this case, it would require a separate set of actions such as writing code, and making testing or updates separately for a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop device. Responsive design in its turn allows us to avoid extra efforts and save time by, for example, working only with one database and one set of code.
Conclusion
Using responsive web design is a logical approach in modern web development. It helps to automatically adapt websites to screen sizes of various devices, which in its turn improves significantly the user experience, and SEO performance and helps to decrease the time and efforts of the development team. At the same time, responsive websites create a better image of any company and make users more engaged.
