When building or redesigning a website, it’s crucial to consider user experience. By optimizing your website with a mobile-first or responsive website design, you can keep users on your pages longer and rank higher in Google search results. With over 65% of all online searches being made on a mobile device, it’s important to prioritize your website’s mobile format and functionality.
While a mobile-first web design is always responsive, a responsive web design isn’t always a mobile-first website. Differing in approach and strategy, both website styles will improve user accessibility and website ranking on search engines. At Performance Driven Marketing, we can help you increase website visits, click-rates, and overall efficiency. Read more to discover what website design is best for your business.
What is Responsive Website Design?
A responsive website is designed to make each page render effectively on any screen or device. Using media queries, flexible grids, and resizable images, responsive designs adjust to fit the size of the device being used to access the website, whether it’s a phone, desktop, tablet, or T.V. A responsive web design enhances user experience by increasing the website’s appearance and functionality, improving format and navigation, and creating accessibility with convenience.
Added Benefits of a Responsive Website Design
Aside from ensuring all your website users are content no matter the device they have, a responsive web design offers other advantages by using ratios and percentage values to respond to every screen size.
- Clickable Links: Whether a button changes when a mouse hovers over it, or when you scroll past it on a phone, all links are easy to access, no matter what device your customer uses.
- Strengthens SEO: If a website won’t respond or load on different devices, clients are more likely to click out of the site. With websites that render quickly for any screen, users will stay longer, and your website will rank higher in Google searches.
- Flexible Aesthetics: With flexible images that shift according to the website size, text that re-formats to fit the screen, and animations or features that adjust to work with any device, your website’s content is easy to understand.
What is Mobile-First Website Design?
As its name suggests, a mobile-first website is created first for the mobile device. Designed around the size and functionality of a mobile device, the mobile-first website differs from a responsive website in that it not only works on a mobile device, but it’s made for users with mobile devices. This design takes a progressive approach, starting with the smallest screen sizes and slowly expanding to add features for bigger devices. Where a responsive design squeezes content into a smaller size, mobile-first begins with a phone layout and increases it to fill desktop dimensions.
Advantages of a Mobile-First Website Design and Progressive Website Apps
With the responsive nature of a mobile-first design, it has many of the same benefits that a responsive design offers, like strengthening SEO, accessibility on portable devices, and improving rendering speeds, appearance, and navigation. Mobile-first websites are becoming more and more popular with the rising rates of searches executed on smartphones and traffic driven from social media.
Design your mobile-first website to function like a mobile app by turning it into a progressive web app. This allows your site to be downloaded to a phone’s home screen and behave like a traditional mobile app, while remaining on the web. By prioritizing the mobile design, you can access even more advantages.
- Offline Independence: Progressive web apps can function offline due to their app-like design.
- Installable: These web apps can be downloaded and installed to a user’s home screen, allowing them to navigate to your website with ease.
- Responsive: Progressive web apps load quickly and are designed to function better on a mobile device.
- Re-engageable: Web apps can implement push notifications and keep users engaged with your site.
Enhance your Website Design with Performance Driven Marketing
Whether you depend on web traffic from mobile social media apps or clicks from ads on desktop games, we can help you build the right website for your business. With experienced web developers, we can help you create a responsive, mobile-friendly website that enhances your platform and improves your advertising. At Performance Driven Marketing, we are dedicated to providing our clients with functional, aesthetic, and enticing websites. From E-commerce web development to website content writing, we can help you bring in new customers by optimizing your website. Contact us with inquiries or to request a consultation today!
