The importance of a responsive design in website development cannot be underestimated. Many people now use smartphones for browsing and shopping, thus emphasizing the essence of a responsive web design. A research carried out recently showed that about 25% of Americans made use of mobile gadgets to surf the internet. 20% of the world population owns a mobile phone and 50% of this population use it to access the web.
If your website is not responsive, you end up losing a whole lot of potential customers. Additionally, websites that have responsive design tend to rank higher up on Google search engine.
Though it is not so easy to get started, the following tips and tricks will go a long way in assisting to design a responsive website.
1. Optimize Image
Images are very imperative in the design of your website. They help to emotional connect your clients with your brand. They also get to see the product they want to purchase. Therefore, images should be properly optimized for your website. You can optimize images by saving them in the appropriate format. Logos and icons should be saved in PNG-8 format while photographs should be saved in JPG format. An image size reducer tool can be used to optimize image size which keeping image-quality intact.
2. Improve the Outlook of your site
Always remember that mobile users navigate websites with their fingertips. Therefore, designers should avoid overdoing themselves by keeping the design simple yet functional. Overdoing will eventually hurt your website loading and makes users confused. If you are designing websites for insurance agents make sure that you keep things simple and intact; so that users can browse site easily and find what they are looking for in no time; whether on mobile or desktop.
3. Design mobile version first, then only desktop version
Another way around getting a responsive design is to consider a mobile first approach. This ensures that you have a first-hand experience of how the text, images, and logos will look like on mobile devices and then start working to scale up to larger device—desktop.
4. Ensure your site is fast
Most designers don’t give a damn about the website loading speed and when they are asked to make responsive design, they keep on adding elements and features which tends to make website much slower; and the stats says it all. A research carried out on sites with responsive designs showed that about 48% of them loaded between 4 to 8 seconds. Nowadays, people expect websites to load faster at below 4 seconds; otherwise get ready to lose a lot of customers and a chuck of money. The main reason behind it is not optimizing images and minifying elements. This problem can be solved by optimizing images with image resizing tool, using a cache plugin/script and also going with CDN services.
5. Optimize Text
You should ensure that your text is clear enough to be read on big screens. An optimum size for text is 16px or 1cm. The line height should be adjusted to 1.5cm to ensure that paragraphs are legible. Texts being either small or large on mobile devices makes it hard for users to read your website content. So, keep it at optimum level.
6. Get rid of redundant elements
In order to enhance your website speed and improve user experience, you should get rid of un-needed elements, codes, scripts, css, plugins etc. Websites with excessive and unnecessary elements are usually unattractive, slow and have errors crop up when server is upgraded or downgraded. Keep things simple don’t make it complicated. Simplicity and minimalistic is the future.
7. Compress elements
You should enable compression of elements on your site to reduce the number of bytes sent. This will increase loading speed and make it easier to navigate the site. Elements like JavaScript and CSS should by minified by removing using cache plugins/scripts.
8. Select the Cloud Hosting Solution
The performance of your website depends to a large extent on your selected hosting solution, server configuration and not on the few numbers of tweaks made. It is imperative you select the cloud service from Google, Amazon, DigitalOcean as this would largely be beneficial in the long run.
9. Improve Navigation
Navigation is important in increasing page visits and bossing web design. It is also imperative to retaining clients. Mobile sites should be easily navigable, and the menu should be clearly visible. Link to other pages should be seamless too. So, make sure you keep navigation as one of the priority design elements when making a responsive website.
Conclusion
The importance of a responsive web design has been overlooked for long. It is now quintessential as it makes it easier for clients to navigate your site seamlessly. It also improves the reputation of your brand. By adhering to the tips listed above, you would have a responsive website that would give clients a pleasing experience.
