If you are a small business looking to grow your online presence to generate more leads and improve sales, then there are a few key features that are absolutely essential to your website’s design.
The needs of your website will vary business to business.
For example, some stores will need a shopping cart so that clients can purchase your products directly from the site. Other businesses need to have galleries that are regularly updated with examples of their work.
However, every single business needs to have a responsive web design.
What is Responsive Design
Responsive website design allows your website to change its display based on how it is being viewed.
If someone is reading your site on an iPhone for example, the site responsive design will condense the website to make it easier to view, likely having only one column of content viewable at a time.
If someone reads it on their laptop, however, they will be able to see significantly more content on one screen.
So why is this so important for your website and your businesses success?
1. Responsive Design Improves the Experience for Multi Interface Users
This is basically a fancy way of saying that having a responsive website set up will make the user experience better for people who read your content on different types of devices.
Personally, I have quit reading websites before simply because of how poor the mobile design was.
If you have users who use multiple platforms or use mobile exclusively, then having a responsive design is an absolute must.
If you don’t, you will lose potential clients, guaranteed.
2. Responsive Design Improves SEO Ranking
Google spent years promoting the concept of mobile friendly websites, promising that one day they would use the “Mobile Friendly” designation to help determine a website’s rank.
Well, that day has come.
Now, Google rewards businesses who have responsive web design with improved SEO rankings.
This means that if your website is not “mobile friendly” or responsive, then you are effectively getting penalized and will have to work that much harder to appear in any search engine.
If you ever want to make it to the first page of Google, then you have to setup a responsive website.
3. Having a Responsive Web Design Reduces Maintenance
If you are running a website that operates on the “mobile only” approach where the site detects the device a person is using and sends them to a separate mobile website, then you are making more work for yourself.
Whenever you have a responsive web design, you eliminate half of the workload related to website updates and maintenance.
If you have a mobile only website, you constantly have to update the regular and mobile versions of your site and unnecessarily increasing your workload.
Not to mention that mobile only sites typically come with about half the number of features of a fully optimized responsive website.
Conclusion
If you do not have a responsive web design, you are:
- Damaging your SEO ranking
- Alienating members of your audience who primarily use mobile devices
- Increasing your workload
- Limiting the features on your mobile site
And much more!
I hope you see why setting up a responsive website is an important investment.
If you want help getting started, drop me a line via email or just reply in the comments section of this post.
Good luck.