6 Actionable Tips To Improve Your Responsive Website

Design

Having a responsive website quickly stopped being a novelty, but rather an industry-standard in
website design.
In fact, mobile traffic was responsible for more than 54% of all global web traffic in 2021, which
means the need for responsive web design is growing as we speak.
It’s really no wonder, as the responsive design offers significant advantages, allowing various
SEO improvements, streamlined development and most importantly, supreme user experience.
But first, what does responsive design truly means?
All in all, responsive website design responds to user needs. It adapts to all screen sizes and
resolutions by creating dynamic changes to the appearance of a website. In responsive design,
page elements are reshuffled as the viewport grows or shrinks.
The purpose of a responsive design is to make a website that scales its content and elements to
match the screen size. It keeps images and content from being larger than the screen width and
prevents visitors on mobile devices from needing to put an extra effort into absorbing your
content.
Now that we have a clear roadmap and the ultimate goal, how to make the journey both more
enjoyable and efficient?
Whether you’re a top custom web design agency or a sole web designer who just dipped his/her
toes into a larger industry, these are 6 proven ways to improve your responsive web design:

1. Adopt a “Mobile First” Mentality

As insights show, mobile users are the top priority. When designing a responsive website start
with mobile styles as your foundation and work up to a desktop version later.
Mobile-first design helps you focus on what truly matters on limited screen size and even
shorter attention span. It helps you evaluate what’s visually and fictionally essential.
Not to mention that it is easier to scale up the mobile version than to scale down the desktop
one.

2. Allow For Touchscreens

With more and more people browsing on mobile devices the precise accuracy of a desktop
mouse became second fiddle to “clumsy” fingers.
For that reason, even newer laptops are designed with touchscreens in mind. Therefore, every
interactive element on your website including navigation buttons, links, CTAs and such, must be
larger as tiny elements are very difficult to touch on smartphones and we all know this kind of
frustration directly feeds the bounce rate.
Bottom point - design for the thumb! If your targets are large enough for the thumb and fluid
enough to make browsing as seamless as possible, you have a winning combination.

3. Try a Pre-designed Theme and/or Layout

There’s a saying between New York’s software development companies – simplicity is
everything! Don’t over-design. Convenient is more important than eye-pleasing.
In fact, if you don’t have the time or the desire to design a responsive website, you can always
employ a pre-designed layout that best suits your needs. All your worries can be reduced to
what color you want and where to put your content, CTAs and branding elements.
If you’re using WordPress, there are a bunch of free themes available for you right from the get-
go.

4. Optimize Your Assets

It goes without saying but, all your content, images, videos, etc. needs to be fully optimized for
all manner of screens and devices. Huge assets that take too long to load are website killers, no
matter how pretty they may be.
Visuals don’t have to be load all at once. For example, below-the-fold content can be loaded as
the user starts scrolling. This method is called “lazy loading” where loading of “heavy” elements
is delayed in order not to hinder the overall performance.

5. Don’t Compromise. Not ever!

This may sound contradictory to our previous point, but what we mean by not compromising is
that responsive web design should never be used to water down your desktop website.
It’s not the “diet” or “preview” version of the website, but your main focus. In fact, mobile
versions require even more features to be added.
Mobile hardware can be implemented into your responsive design. Employing capabilities of a
native device such as cameras, geo-location, off-line support, data input and more are easier on
small devices as long as websites are taking advantage of them.
Bottom line – keep it simple, easy to use and don’t cut corners. The three “don’ts” would be:

 Don't use browse sniffing: Eventually, browsers will catch up

 Don’t disable zooming: It’s necessary for mobile users
 Don’t hide content: In eyes of your users, it’s the same as pay walling or not having
enough in the first place
6. Focus On the Content
You may be wondering what does content have to do with the design practices? The truth is –
everything.
When prospects land on your homepage, they’re not looking for clever motion graphics or pretty
visuals, but the solutions to their needs.
So, make sure all your valuable content is easy to spot and see even when the space is
extremely limited. Try to ensure that all the headers are visible on mobile devices without the
need to scroll (much).
Mind you, to convert users are looking for strong content that helps them solve their problems
and/or unmet needs.

Conclusion
Responsive web design may be cheap and easy to implement but it MUST be planned from the
start. It is one of the handiest web browsing technologies to appear in recent years but not
implementing it correctly is worse than not having it at all.
Be mindful of your content and your assets. Always design having mobile users constantly in
your mind and most importantly don’t let anything hinder website performance!