Why it is important to have a responsive eCommerce

There are more than 54 million smartphone users in Spain, so most of your target audience probably has one. Of those 54 million, around 80% use their smartphones to search for products and make their purchasing decisions. While that's already quite a large number, it's set to continue growing through 2021, with nearly 60 million smartphone users expected by 2022.

A few years ago it was all about having a mobile version of your website. As the number of mobile devices of different sizes is increasing, that method has become obsolete and redundant. A responsive website adjusts to all device sizes, since the site automatically reformats itself to adapt to them.

What is responsive Web Design?

There are a multitude of different screen sizes on phones, phablets, tablets, desktops, game consoles, TVs and even wearables. Screen sizes are constantly changing, so it is important that your website adapts to any screen size, today or in the future. In addition, devices have different characteristics that we interact with. For example, some of your visitors will use a touch screen. Modern responsive design takes all of these things into account to optimize everyone's experience.

The term "responsive web design" was coined by web designer Ethan Marcotte, and introduced publicly in an article on the allistapart.com website titled "Responsive Web Design" in 2010. Marcotte followed up with a more in-depth explanation in his book "A Book Apart - Responsive Web Design", published the following year, in 2011.

The main feature of responsive design is that it is fluid and regardless of the screen size of the user accessing the website, the website will adjust accordingly. A combination of CSS3, fluid grids, media queries and other development tricks allow this to happen immediately. From the user's point of view, the user can view the website in absolute comfort and with a minimum of fuss. Behind the scenes, however, the use of a fluid approach is what makes this possible with everything controlled by changes in screen size.

Of the two ways, responsive design is the more popular and certainly better known outside of the web design world itself, so much so that responsive design has become sort of synonymous with mobile friendly websites.

Responsive design can be achieved in three simple steps. A flexible grid-based layout, enabling flexible media, and finally adding media queries.

At El Estudio de Andrés we know how important a responsive design is for your eCommerce, so we include it as standard in all our websites. If you still need convincing, here is a list of the top 3 reasons why responsive web design is essential.

1. It will give your mobile users the right look and feel.

Nowadays it is more important than ever to consider how your website or eCommerce looks and functions on a mobile device to ensure that your users have a pleasant and satisfying experience. A visit to your website from a mobile device may be the first contact someone has with your company, so you need to make a good impression. If we do it wrong, it is possible that the user will abandon your website and buy elsewhere.

If your product is high quality and your team has a valuable experience, then a smooth and thoughtful mobile user experience will leave a good first impression of your business. If it's outdated, impractical and frustrating, unfortunately that's the image that will be carried over.

However, it's not as simple as having everything scaled down to fit on a smaller screen, but every element has to be considered to make sure it looks good and works seamlessly for all users. The menu has to adapt to a smaller device and the text or images have to remain legible.

2. It is recommended by Google

Google loves responsive websites. The more user-friendly a website is, the more likely it is to rank high, and the higher it ranks, the easier it is for people to find your business through a keyword search.

It is also preferable to opt for a responsive design rather than a mobile version of your website, as this prevents Google from detecting duplicate content, which would also negatively affect your ranking.

With the recent launch of mobile-first indexing, it is now more important than ever to understand how Google reads your website. Until now, your website has been crawled, indexed and ranked based on desktop content, mobile-first means that mobile content will now be the key to securing site visits.

3. It will make your life easier

It's important to make sure your website has fresh and unique content, as this is another feature Google looks for in your website. But if you have a desktop version and a dedicated mobile version of your website it can be quite costly. Any updates you make to one, no matter how small, will have to be made to the other as well. If you opt for professional web design zaragoza, the update times will be cut in half, which means that it is not only faster but also cheaper to update your website.

Having a responsive web design will help your website to be ready for the future, as more and more devices with new dimensions and resolutions are appearing every year.

A responsive web design can adapt to the environment it is in, which will help your website continue to work on new devices in the near future.

At El Estudio de Andrés | Diseñador Web Zaragoza we build all our sites to be responsive and rigorously test them using different sized devices to make them load efficiently and to make them robust and easy to use. In a sense this is taking ideas from the adaptive school and applying them to responsive and is a practical response to the evolution of web design.

If you are curious to see how these sites look on different sized devices, you can find several websites in the online portfolio of El Estudio de Andrés.