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Web design is said to be mobile responsive if it is adjustable to both desktop and mobile screens. Mobile responsiveness is becoming a hot topic for online businesses. Most of the users, now using mobile to surf on the internet and you cannot afford to have a non-responsive website design. Mobile responsive web design is flexible enough to adjust with different screens. In this article, there is a discussion about the importance of mobile responsive web design and how you can make your web design more responsive.

Your website can be viewed on mobile does not mean it is responsive. To make your mobile web design more responsive you have to adjust its layouts, text, images, and frameworks based on mobile user behavior. Responsive web designs are also very effective in increasing your search engine ranking. According to the new search engine algorithm of Google, websites with responsive designs rank higher. Using the information provided in this article, you can make your web design more responsive to mobile devices.

You should keep in mind that the number of mobile phone users is increasing rapidly and users find it more convenient to search from mobile, which is always in their hands. Now, it is time to make your mobile web design more responsive to increase your online traffic and ranking on Google. Some of the most essential tips that you must consider to make mobile responsive web designs are as follows:

Plan Your Web Design

Before designing the website, you should have a complete design of layouts, images, text, navigations, and buttons in mind for both PC and mobile. While browsing through mobile, you can find that some websites are so cool as if they are made for mobile, the navigation is super easy and the layouts look good. On the other side, some websites seem like a smaller version of the PC website, where images, buttons, and navigations just become very small and it is hard to click on. Most companies design a website keeping in mind laptop and desktop screens that go very silly on mobile phones.

If you are an online business owner, you cannot go along with unresponsive mobile site design. Sometimes the button on your website blocks the content because it gets more traffic to your website. The content on the site is blocked which makes it very hard to read on the small screen. Responsive web design makes your website more visible on the search engine. In this case, to avoid any problem you have to ensure while designing the website that the share button is nicely scaled in your website. To ensure the working of the share button of your website, you can take a Google mobile-friendly test for different devices.

So before doing any coding part, you should make a complete design of visuals and layouts of your site that look good on both mobile and PC screens.

Learn About Mobile User Behavior

We all know that using a mobile phone is very different from using a laptop or PC. Your website needs optimization in almost all parts and you can also monitor the analytics of your site to understand the behavior of your users, for example, which pages they are most likely to visit on your site. Once you know about the behavior of your visitors, you can make a better design for the pages most visited by users.

For example, if you think that your users are more likely to visit the contact and bookings pages then you should put both pages in the navigation menu and also make them more responsive, so the users can easily get the required information.

Flexible Grid

The grid is an important element of responsive friendly design layouts. The fluid grid in the site allows you to ensure the flexibility and scalability of the mobile web design. Here you can analyze different elements such as proportion, consistent spacing, or screen resolution. The flexibility of the grid has a direct relationship with the responsiveness of the website.

Layouts Should Be Flexible

The layouts of the website design should be more flexible, so it can be adjustable to different screen sizes. On mobile phones, your users don’t have enough space, so you have to make your layout smart and look cool on all screens. Today, most mobiles have a built-in feature that zooms out the entire site on the screen automatically. Although it is a good feature finding the required information can be a bit hard for the user. You should design a more flexible and mobile-friendly design. It is better to make the layout of the site more adjustable for mobiles, so your users would not have any issues accessing the desired information.

friendly design. It is better to make the layout of the website more adjustable for mobiles, so your users would not have any issues accessing the desired information.

Flexible Text & Images

The text & images of the mobile-responsible sites should be very flexible, so they can easily be adjustable to the different spaces, and the size of the text also be adaptable to various screen sizes. The responsive mobile website design can change the height and width of the text depending on the screen which improves its legibility.

You can also make the text more flexible by using CSS styles. The CSS coding can make your website text more mobile-friendly. Making the images more flexible is a bit more difficult task than the text because the loading time of the images on the smaller devices is slower. Depending on the device, the images also have the ability to crop or disappear from the content, it can make your content look less attractive to the user.

Images Optimization

The right use of images is essential to make your website more attractive. By using the images, you can make your content more reader-friendly and it also helps the users to view the pictures of your products and services. You need to optimize the images for the small screen also, so they can load fast on mobile devices. Sometimes the websites take longer to load on the mobile phone because the images are not optimized for the phones. Try to use the images jpg or photographic, and by using the online tools you can also adjust the size of the image depending on the screen.

By using the images in your content, you can trigger emotions in the user and make your site look more interesting to the user. But make sure to optimize the images for the website, so you would not have any issues related to bandwidth and scaling.

Use CSS Media Queries

The media queries are done in the code of your mobile site design which is responsible for the flexibility of the layouts on the website. You can make a more responsive layout by using the media queries in the code more efficiently. CSS media queries are said to be the filters for applying CSS styling on the website. The CSS media queries are applied to the web design depending on the breakpoint of the device. Use media queries wisely to make your web design more responsive. With the help of these queries, you can use the HTML pages to allow the designs of multiple layouts on your webpage. The responsiveness of the site can be increased by using the CSS media queries in the coding design effectively.

The CSS media queries are enough to optimize your content width, height, orientation, and resolution for different devices. To use the CSS media queries appropriately for optimizing the responsiveness of the website, you should know about the basic CSS media query rules.

Optimize Typography

To make the textual content of your website more readable on the small screen of mobiles, you should do the optimization for the typography. The website on the desktop has more space for the content, but on the mobile, the screen is very small and if you don’t optimize the content, it looks very congested here. Try to use the legible font styles on your website, the curvy and more stylish content will be more difficult to read on the small screen.

Minimalist Design

When it comes to the website, try to be minimalistic. You should only show the information that is beneficial for the user and try to avoid any unnecessary details. To make the responsive and adaptive design of your website, you must eliminate all the clutter and useless information. It is easier for the user to find the required information if you are putting minimum and essential content on your website.

Being minimalist also helps your website to load faster and it will also be good for the Google ranking of your website.

Be Careful About Navigation

The navigation menu is the most used part of your website, so you make sure that it is responsive to mobile. On the mobile, the navigation should not be very small to click. Designing your navigation effectively is critical to boosting your website ranking on Google. Make sure that the menu in your navigation bar is clearly visible on the small screen of the mobile. You can also use the hamburger menu for the navigation to the other pages.

You should make an extra effort to make your navigation more attractive and responsive on mobile, so the user would not have any issues using your website on mobile. The navigations of both websites and mobiles are very different. The user experience on your site depends on the navigation. You should optimize your web design menu to improve users’ experience.  You might have seen that on the website the navigations are mostly visible links to different pages, on the other side of the mobile phone, the icons are used instead of links for the navigations.

Use Microinteractions

Most of the designer ignores the microinteractions while designing a mobile responsive website. Although they don’t seem very important they can still have a lot of impact on the user experience on your website. By using the animations wisely, you can improve the user experience on your website, it is like a cherry on the cake. Many companies use microinteractions to make their users more satisfied and it is actually working for them.

Adopt Frameworks

You should use a more responsive framework for website designing, it will save a lot of time while making the website. Most designers choose to use Bootstrap which is an HTML framework and it is the best choice for making static website designs. Use responsive frameworks that work faster. For the advanced website, you can choose the Joomla framework, which also provides a lot of built-in templates to make your website more attractive and nicer.

Keep Design Simple

Your design should be very simple and interactive. Overdoing your design would not only confuse the users but also make your site slow to load. The simple web designs are more user-friendly and the user will not be distracted by a lot of animations while visiting your website. When you use too many animations and images on your website it feels like clutter, where you are unable to find what you want. Your content on the website should be very short (only necessary information), try to use images that are optimized for the different screens. Google also likes designs that are simple and interactive, so you can boost your SEO with a more simple design of the website.

Add Videos Wisely

It is good to add videos to your website because it goes very well with both mobile and PC screens. Mobile users are more likely to watch videos than desktop users. No doubt using the videos on your site can improve its mobile usability but while putting the videos you should consider some important things. Try to use the HTML5 video player for your videos, so it can easily load on your mobile, or you can also use some other video players that are lightweight and easy to load for mobiles. By using the right video player for your website, you can make it more responsive on mobiles but also ensure fast loading time.

Touch Screen Vs. Curser

The mobile users usually use their thumb or finger to surf on the internet. The interaction of mobile phones and desktop users with websites is very different.  Using your thumb for the navigations and clicking the button is not the same as using the curser to perform any action on the websites. The website is said to be responsive if your users can navigate and click on it without pinching on the screen. The buttons on the mobile screen should be big enough to be clicked with the thumb. You can use vivid colors for your buttons, so they can be easily seen on the page. For the button, you can use a rectangle or circle shape.

Use Icons

Most of the time users have difficulty searching on your site because of the excessive information and clutters. Using a lot of text might be confusing for the user on mobile. Using icons is a cool option to make your website more interactive with the user. When you use the icon on the navigations, it might be easier for the user to find the required information on your website. The icons also help your site to be more responsive to mobile.

Keyboard Triggers Forms

The keyboard triggers forms help your website to adjust its size with the screen size. When you input fields trigger on your website, it becomes more responsive to your screen. For example, on the website, there are user forms that require some input, such as email, name, or address that will trigger a textual keyboard, and number input fields would trigger a numerical keyboard on your mobile phones. All you have to make sure that your input field triggers the right keyboard to the screen. 

These are some small things that you should keep in mind to improve the user’s experience on your site and make your content more user-friendly.

Consider Geolocation

For most businesses, one of the main advantages of the increasing use of mobile is that users can easily access the geolocations of businesses. Mobile users are more likely to use the geolocation features of the business, in which the business can give directions to their users about their nearest locations. Businesses can add their geolocations to give direction to mobile users. They can also connect with the local communities such as Yelp, through their mobile devices.

Don’t Overdo Java

Although Java is a tool for designing your web pages try not to use it excessively on your website. The response of JavaScript towards different screens and browsers is very different which can make your site less responsive for some browsers. Even the different models of mobile behave very differently.  I am not saying, you should not use JavaScript at all but try to be clever with it and bear in mind that it can have an effect on the responsiveness of your website.  

Adjust Screen Resolution

Adjusting the screen resolution is very important to make your website responsive. The screen resolution of the site can adjust while making the web design of the website. To make your design more adjustable to the screen resolution you should adopt the mobile-first way approach while designing your website.  In this way, you have to plan your web design keeping in mind mobile usability. It depends on the nature of your business and which approach you would use for the planning of web design. For most businesses such as eCommerce, the maximum number of clients approach them through mobile. So, eCommerce businesses need to use a mobile-first way approach.

For online shopping, people mostly use mobile phones, so you need to make your website highly responsive. An eCommerce business cannot afford to have any mobile responsive website.

Takeaways

The mobile-friendly web design is crucial for improving the user experience of your site on both desktop and mobile. In this article, I have discussed different methods that you can use to make your websites more responsive to mobile phones. Having a responsive website will not only improve your mobile user experience but also improve your search engine ranking because Google ranks responsive websites higher. I have shared different ways to make your site more responsive and interactive for the user on mobiles. 

This article provides a detailed analysis of mobile web design responsiveness’s impact on your mobile user experience and online business. I hope the methods and tips that I have shared with you in this article are helpful. You can share your thoughts about this article with me, in the comments section below.