Mobile devices dominate in the modern world. If you walk down the street in any major city, you will see hundreds of people with their eyes glued to their smartphone or tablet. And, the chances are that a large percentage of these people will be browsing the internet or catching up on the latest updates from their favourite website.

With this in mind, you should be able to see how important it is to keep mobile devices in mind when you’re thinking about web design. One of the best ways to do this is to use responsive design techniques.

What Is Responsive Design?

Basically, a responsive website is one which renders differently on different sized devices. Using responsive CSS code (or a website builder or template with responsive design built in), you will be able to create a versatile website which looks great on pretty much any phone, tablet, computer, or other device.

To put things simply, an optimized website is one which will respond to a user, the device they are using and their actions. In some cases, different elements will be displayed in different positions on different devices. Similarly, some elements could be absent altogether on the mobile version of your website.

Why Is Responsive Design Important?

As you can probably imagine, responsive web design is essential in the modern world. If your website isn’t responsive – and therefore not optimised for mobile devices – you will be missing out on a huge number of visitors using things like smartphones and tablets to browse the internet.

However, there are also numerous other reasons why you should be using responsive design techniques at all times, including:

• Better SEO rankings. Responsive design is one of the key search engine optimization (SEO) ranking factors in the modern world. If your site isn’t mobile optimized, then your chances of ranking well in the search engine results is minimal.
• Improved user experience. If you have any experience in the world of web development and website management, you probably know that the user experience is pretty much the most important thing to think about. Basically, responsive design will improve the user experience by allowing your entire site to render correctly on any device, no matter what shape or size it is.
• Responsive websites are scalable. Since responsive design essentially revolves around your website being able to adapt to different devices with different screen sizes, they are also extremely scalable.
• Easy management. In the past, people used to create separate mobile and desktop versions for their websites. This means that both versions had to be updated every time a change was made, which would have taken both time and effort.

As you can see, there are plenty of reasons why you should always use responsive design techniques for your website.

Final Word

Responsive web design is essential. If you don’t understand that yet, then I’d recommend you go back and read this article again.

Fortunately, most website builders come complete with responsive design templates, which means that you won’t actually have to worry about too much at all. Make sure that you check that your website works on all devices, but you shouldn’t have to do too much more than that.