If you have an online business then you’re probably aware that it’s essential to keep up to date with the constant changes of the Internet, and if you don’t your site may quickly become a ghost town. The habits and preferences of Internet users are always shifting, sometimes for the better, but at times it can be for the worse. Research shows us that currently over fifty-percent of cell phone owners use their mobile to surf the Internet, and this number keeps increasing with every passing year. This makes having a mobile friendly website a necessity if you want it to succeed, because if the site hasn’t been built for mobile users they won’t be able to properly view it and will leave. So if your website hasn’t been updated to take advantage of the boom of mobile Internet users then it’s time you switched to a responsive design for your site.
Why is it So Important to Switch to a Responsive Design?
There are many reasons that you should switch to a responsive design, such as:
A site that hasn’t been updated to include smartphone visitors will appear overly large on a cell phone. Imagine looking at your computer screen and then zooming in so that you had to scroll up and down and back and forth in order to view an entire web page. This can cause a major headache and will likely cause your visitors to seek a site which has a web design better suited for smartphone users. Not installing a theme that favors smartphone users makes it hard to navigate and exhausting for the visitor, so if you want your site to succeed it’s recommended that you make it friendly for our phone browsing friends.
A site that has a responsive theme will also do better in the search engines. If any percentage of your traffic comes from the search engines then you should have your site theme changed immediately. This is because the search engines love themes which are user friendly, and because 50% (and growing) of Internet users browse the web from their phone it wouldn’t be user friendly to not have a web design that would make your site easier to view for phone users, now would it?
Switching to a responsive web design will increase your page loading speed. This has two benefits:
Visitors nowadays are impatient, and if you’re website takes any longer than a few seconds to load completely there is a good chance they’ll leave. People expect to see a full page loaded within a short time-frame and a responsive theme will do the trick.
Google and other search engines hate slow loading websites. When a site has a lot of bells and whistles including plenty of images, videos, or other resource hogging extras it causes the site to load slowly. Since the search engines have made page speed a factor when it comes to how they rank sites it is definitely something to consider. And guess what? A responsive theme loads a lot faster because it keeps the flashiness to a minimum.
So not only will a responsive theme help you to please those who surf the net on their phones, but it will also help you to please the search engines, allowing you to increase organic traffic too.
