Aside from user experience, one of the most important factors to consider while designing the website’s interface is whether the site will be responsive, adaptive, or have a different mobile version from the desktop one. Each method has advantages and disadvantages, and we are going to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Responsive Web Design.

What is Responsive Web Design?

A responsive site makes use of Responsive Web Design (RWD), which means that the site’s design and development should be reactive to the user’s surroundings and behavior. The site should be built and created to fit and adjust to any device, screen size, or purpose. Responsive design is becoming the default option for website design and is even favored by the majority of search engines.

Most current websites employ responsive design due to its ease of design/development and flexibility to adjust to various dimensions presented by the user. Each site component would be able to resize or modify in response to the size of the screen.

Image optimization is one of the issues that may arise while designing a responsive site. Because pictures on responsive sites are merely scaled-down, loading huge images may result in a slower load time for users. This may be avoided by utilizing pictures of varying sizes as breakpoints.

If you want a more app-like experience for mobile, you must carefully consider the functionalities that may be damaged as a result of switching between mobile and desktop layouts. While developing responsive web pages is less challenging in general, one disadvantage is the amount of effort required to build a layout that suits all conceivable contexts.

In a word, responsive web design (RWD) is a web design that allows for the dynamic scaling of layout, graphics, and text inside a web design so that content may be optimized for viewing at varied screen dimensions. Websites that use it make it easy for consumers to view it from anywhere at any time.

Best practices:

• Take the ‘Mobile first“ approach

Increase the size of mobile designs to fit in bigger resolution devices. Always keep in mind that mobile users want big (>40 points) buttons. Furthermore, your design must be twice as intuitive as your desktop counterparts, because the demand for well-sized items on smaller displays might cause web layout breakage & cluttering.

Even if the site isn’t completely mobile-optimized, it’s critical to optimize it as much as possible. Make sure consumers don’t have to zoom in or scroll horizontally to fill out a form or to access the information. If you ignore mobile throughout the design process, the user experience will suffer, and you will most likely have to do extra work after the fact to ensure the site is mobile-friendly.

• Create pictures and fluid grids: Create the images in their original dimensions. If you don’t have enough room/space, crop them to make the most of your area.
• Use only Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs): This is an XML-based file format for 2D graphics that allows for interaction and animations.
• Include three or more breakpoints (design for three or more devices)
• Prioritize and conceal material based on the context of the user. Examine your visual hierarchy and utilize progressive disclosure and navigation drawers to provide users with the most important elements first. Keep non-essentials (nice-to-haves) to a minimum.
• Aim for simplicity
• Apply design patterns: To enhance ease of use and familiarity for people in their contexts: for example, the column drop pattern fits content to various device types.

• When choosing font sizes and styles, keep accessibility in mind: Leverage the contrast and background more effectively. Make the headlines at least 1.6 times the size of the body content. Make all text responsive in order for it to display in these proportions. Because some people use screen readers, make all of your text “actual” rather than text inside graphics.
• Use the right CSS media queries: To save effort on responsive design style, make sure you have default CSS media queries set up. However, this does not imply that you should rely solely on the default style. You should still go over each page during development to ensure that all components scale down effectively and that the overall functionality provides a satisfactory mobile user experience.

Advantages:

User-friendly web design: Responsive web design is uniquely built to adjust to customer or user behaviors and demands, as well as screen size, and so on. It is used to design a website that easily changes to multiple screen sizes, particularly for mobile viewing. As a result, it broadens access to consumers and users via small devices such as smartphones and tablets.

SEO-friendly: Responsive websites are often in charge of ranking first in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). A responsive website loads significantly faster on mobile devices or small devices than on a desktop or laptop. This naturally promotes a good user experience, which results in a higher SEO position for the website.

Increase your profit and sales: Responsive web design is simple to build and deploy. This is due to the lack of a need for a separate webpage for small mobile devices. A responsive website is one that has been specifically built to accommodate all screen sizes. As a result, time, effort, maintenance costs, and development expenditures associated with establishing another website for tiny devices can be saved. It typically improves user experience and reaches a larger audience via mobile devices. The larger the audience, the greater the profit and sale.

Low maintenance: Responsive websites are built to accommodate all screen sizes. There are no changes to the content or other aspects to accommodate a different device. This website’s content is the same across all devices. Because there is only one website that suits all screen sizes, the expense of maintaining two websites is also reduced, as keeping a separate site for mobile devices necessitates a significant amount of testing and support. Managing a single website necessitates less maintenance, lowers costs, saves time, and so on.

Users may be tracked easily: Responsive websites require less time to load, saving time and money, as well as avoiding the development work of establishing a separate website for tiny devices. This time and effort can be used to track site visits. We can track user behavior using tools like Google Analytics, and Microsoft Clarity.

Disadvantages:

Slow page loading: Responsive websites are simple to manage, but they might take a long time to load. It contains several high-resolution images and videos that might take a long time to load.

Some responsive websites will take longer to load. It isn’t a major problem because some more HTML/CSS will be loaded. Images on a responsive site, for example, are simply visibly scaled-down rather than re-sized for faster load times.

It’s difficult to navigate: Responsive websites are specifically built to fit on small devices. However, retaining the simplicity of huge websites on mobile devices might be problematic & tricky at times. This is because mobile devices have smaller screen sizes, making it more difficult to access websites on mobile devices.

Related read: 8 Amazing Web Design Trends on 2022

The liquid nature of responsive web design makes it difficult for designers to maintain tight control over the design style. Designers are attempting to create separate wireframes and design prototypes for mobile and desktop layouts. Only when these two layouts have been modified, the responsive Web design approach be fully implemented & achieved.

Time-consuming development: Responsive websites are necessary, but they require a long time to construct as compared to standard websites. It takes time to create a responsive website. It may take longer if you wish to transform an existing site into a responsive one. If you want a new responsive website, you should design it from the beginning. It refers to the process of developing HTML/CSS from the creation of prototypes using prototyping tools such as Mockplus.

Bad Compatibility with Old browsers: It is not advised to employ responsive design if the majority of your site’s visitors use an older version of Internet Explorer. This is a fatal flaw in previous versions of the Internet Explorer browser (IE6, IE7, IE8).

Why Responsive Web design is important for SEO?

When Google urges webmasters (to) use responsive web design as an industry best practice, there is no doubt what to do. The idea is that, as previously said and demonstrated, sites with responsive web design make it easier and more efficient for Google to crawl, index, and arrange material.

Because Google considers user experience to be an essential factor in ranking, it is a good idea to adopt a responsive design for your website, especially if you are SEO-conscious.

Recently Google is primarily considering Core Web Vitals including First Input Delay, Largest Contentful paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift. So it is very important for websites to score better in all of these aspects.

Summary

From the above factors, it is clear that Responsive Web Design has its own pros & cons if implemented. As a Leading Web Designer Agency in Toronto, we intend to design beautiful & aesthetic websites for small & medium scale businesses. If you’re a business owner who wants to design your website for free, contact MaizonWeb.