What Is a Responsive Website?
A responsive website is a website that is designed to respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on the screen size, platform (desktop monitor, tablet, phone and so on), and orientation (whether portrait or landscape). A responsive website uses fluid, proportion-based grids and flexible images to create a dynamic, flexible website that provides a great user experience that looks great on any device.
Questions that will in answered in this article include the following”
Why is it important to have a responsive website?
Websites are viewed in many different ways and on many different devices. Long gone are the days of a website being viewed on a desktop monitor most of the time. The platforms used to access a website depends on the target audience and the content of the website, but the trend for many years has leaned heavily towards mobile devices. According to Oberlo, just ten years ago, over 90% of website traffic occurred on desktop computers. By late 2022, those figures had totally changed. Now, over 60% of all web traffic comes through mobile devices, with over 50% of all website visits coming through such devices.
In addition, more and more people are accessing websites through wearable devices and their car’s navigation systems among other platforms. It is important that your website can be viewed properly regardless of the device that is being used because it allows users to have a better user experience. Google also rewards websites that are optimized for mobile devices, so having a responsive website is also important for SEO.
How can I tell if my website is responsive?
Many website builders, like WordPress, provide tools that will allow you to “see” what a website will look like on a desktop monitor, on a tablet, or over a mobile phone. It may be a good idea to use those tools regularly to get an idea of what your website looks like on various devices, but those tools are not 100% accurate. They cannot account for all possible screen sizes or device types nor can they always accurately reflect the performance of a website in an actual environment.
The only surefire way to determine whether a website is responsive is to actually look at it on various devices and see if it looks and responds as you wish for it to. There is no substitute to actually looking at the website itself.
If I am using a website builder, do I need to worry about my website being responsive?
Yes, though it may not be as much of a factor as creating a website from scratch. Many pre-designed templates from WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace, among others, come with pre-designed templates that are designed to be responsive, but that doesn’t mean they always are. When designing a website, regardless of method of doing so, you may wish to check your website on different devices to ensure that it is truly responsive.
How do I make my website responsive?
- Add the following ‘meta’ tag to your HTML Head:
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>
By doing so, you are styling your meta tag as code. - Some markup languages, such as pure HTML, tend to be responsive by nature, but you are very limited to what you can do with just HTML.
- You can use a CSS Flexbox/Grid. CSS dictates how a document looks and controls its responsiveness, and this will allow you to resize items depending on the size of the screen.
- Add breakpoints that will change the design of the website when it starts looking awkward on different sized devices. This includes having a single column of images and text on narrow-screened devices that changes to two or even three columns on wider screens. You can also use a different font size for different break points to increase its readability.
- Set images and other elements to 100vw. By doing so, the elements will be able to resize with the size of the screen.
Do you have any app development or technology questions? We would like to supply answers. Feel free to contact us via our website, leave us a note via the live messaging feature on our website, or call us at (208) 344-1115. We look forward to answering all of your questions so you can make informed decisions that are right for you.
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