Once upon a time, people accessed websites via their desktops. In the past decade, the shift to browsing the internet with mobile devices has skyrocketed. Today, your site visitors are just as likely to be on their smartphones as a desktop computer. Ensuring you have a responsive website that adapts to user needs is crucial to building a successful online presence.
Knowing how to make a responsive website is about more than just ensuring images and text scales down to smaller screen sizes. You also must focus on functionality and consider the entire user experience (UX) from the perspective of your target audience.
Knowing Your Users
The way people go online tipped to more than half of internet traffic coming from mobile devices. Although recent data suggests around 69.4% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices, people still use computers to access the world wide web.
If you want your site to reach all your users, you must ensure it is a responsive website for all devices–mobile and desktop. Take the time to survey your audience, track analytics and see if your stats are similar to general numbers.
Consider These Features for a Successful Responsive Website
Every responsive website must have some crucial characteristics to perform well. While there are a lot of things you can do to improve UX on mobile devices, a responsive website will embrace these factors. These common responsive features will make your UX stand out from the competition:
Fluid Grids
The layout of a site needs to adapt to different screen sizes and respond accordingly. Your layout can make or break your success with mobile traffic. Fluid grids can change based on percentages, so everything stays balanced while scaling down.
Avoid fixed-width layouts, which can move elements off the screen and force mobile users to scroll to the side to see everything. Many won’t and will bounce away from your site to competitors.
Responsive Images
Responsive images offer a better experience because they look good and load fast. Optimizing larger images by making them more size-appropriate for smaller screens keeps from bogging down your load times. Your entire website performance will improve.
You also can code your site to pull from a smaller version of the image for mobile users, so they don’t run into a situation where the image fills the entire screen and they can’t access the text or buttons. You can define image sizes in your “srcset” and “sizes” attributes while developing your site.
Speed
You can work on user-friendly files by optimizing them and reducing the time to load on mobile devices. Users will abandon a site if it loads slowly. They’re used to 5G and lightning fast WiFi connections. They won’t wait around for a frozen page.
Reducing the size decreases the load. When a mobile device pulls from a smaller file, it is much more likely to load in a split second for the site visitor and create an excellent UX.
CSS Media Queries
You can use the media query command to define styles for mobile devices and even target various screen sizes. Adjust elements such as font size, column layout, image size and interactive features.
One command that works well to optimize for mobile is the max-width property. You can add some CSS code, such as @media only screen and (max-width: 768px). You’ll need to code the language so it suits your users and website.
Another thing to consider for excellent mobile responsiveness is where your breakpoints are in your design. So your breakpoints will kick in when users hit certain values, like the @media queries. However, the entire style settings must adjust, including navigational structure and other elements.
If you aren’t a coder, WordPress has plugins that will do the work for you. You could also hire a website developer to tweak your settings.
HTML5
Switching to HTML5 ensures your elements show on mobile devices more easily. For example, using Adobe Flash will fail on a mobile device and users won’t be able to see the video or interactive element you want them to see. In addition, HTML has semantic tags to better structure your content and integrate with CSS media queries. This pushes flexible layouts and lets your design better adapt to smaller screens.
Minimize Everything
One of the best ways to create a responsive design is to make your site more minimalistic. The simpler the website, the easier it is to ensure everything is functioning as it should on all devices.
Start by cutting any clutter from your page. If users don’t interact with it, lose it. You can use heat maps to see where they are clicking and consider how it ties to your sales funnel.
Stay away from complicated animations and things that might not load well on a cell phone. Get back to basics with your layout, typography and images for a less cluttered site and better mobile responsiveness. The fewer elements you have, the easier it is to create media queries for them.
Run Tests
In addition to running mobile responsive tests using a variety of tools, you should pick up a cell phone and see how the site looks to you on your devices. Does everything load as it should? Are there any delays in timing? How is the navigation and call to action button working?
Look at your site like a person visiting it for the first time. Click on links, scroll down and check things out until you’re confident users will have an excellent experience on your site.
About The Author
Cooper Adwin is the Assistant Editor of Designerly Magazine. With several years of experience as a social media manager for a design company, Cooper particularly enjoys focusing on social and design news and topics that help brands create a seamless social media presence. Outside of Designerly, you can find Cooper playing D&D with friends or curled up with his cat and a good book.