Why do you need Responsive Websites?

In 2016, almost 52.7 % of all internet users accessed the internet via their mobile devices. Studies show that this number will only grow further in the future. So what does this mean for the future of websites and WordPress development companies in India? Since more than half the population now prefer phones and tablets over desktops, your website needs to be able to adapt and display effectively on any screen size. Hence, WordPress development companies are shifting their focus onto building mobile-friendly designs which are highly responsive. Not only does this lead to better user experience, but it also helps in converting leads and furthering growth.

Furthermore, from 2015, Google’s search algorithm has been rewarding websites that are mobile-friendly and responsive. Therefore, if you have a highly responsive website, chances are that you will end up higher on Google’s rankings. This, in turn, leads to more viewers and visitors, helping you funnel your leads and convert them more efficiently. Luckily for you, if your WordPress site isn’t up to the mark when it comes to response, there are several methods to make it good to go. Here’s a look at some ways WordPress development companies help you make your website more responsive.

Test Yourself First

The very first step in building a responsive website is bench-marking your current design to know where you stand with regards to responsiveness. So go ahead and take a mobile-friendly test to understand your current level of responsiveness, and to figure out ways to improve your performance. While your website might look great on a device, you need to test it with multiple screen sizes to truly understand how responsive it is. Test it on every screen or mobile phone you have to ensure a good response. Also, to make things simpler you can use the free tool handed out by Google. All you need to do to test your website is to enter your URL and wait for your results. The quick assessment will tell you if your website is mobile-friendly or not. Once you know where you stand, let us start getting better.

Creating a Responsive WordPress Website- Theme 

If you are using a WordPress Theme built by any reputed WordPress development company, then chances are you are good to go. However, if you are using an old theme, there might be a reason to worry. Therefore, make sure you switch to a more updated theme to ensure maximum mobile optimization. Double-check both your WordPress and Theme version, and update them if needed. For instance, WordPress 4.4 added several functionalities that helped developers build responsive images. In case your updates don’t help, go for a different, newer theme that focuses on mobile-friendly services. Before you decide on any new theme, test the demo out on multiple devices and read as many reviews as possible.

Creating Your Own Responsive Theme

If you want to make your own mobile-friendly theme, then that’s a great option too. Remember to start out slow and really experiment before making any drastic changes. A great option would be to use Local and experiment to your heart’s content before finalizing your ideas. Local gives you the freedom to work with multiple options without actually tearing up your current website. Furthermore, this WordPress development tool allows you to create shareable URLs to test how your site looks on various devices. While designing, ask yourself how you want your images to scale, how the navigation bar needs to look and also what content your website needs to hide. Make use of media queries to set boundaries for your design, and think of every element individually before integrating it into the design.

Tips for Responsive Web Design

• Make use of responsive plug-ins as much as possible.
• Always ensure all your widgets and CTA buttons scale well on different screen sizes.
• In case you have a button that misbehaves, give an option to disable them while scaling up or down.
• Avoid pop-ups when it comes to mobile devices as they can be very annoying.
• Consider all the media you have on your website and strategist effectively, keeping in mind a responsive design.
• Hide certain elements if they do not scale properly. 
•  Make sure you keep track of your media size to ensure your pages load on time.
•  Use the smallest file size available, without compromising on quality.

The post How to make the best Responsive Website in WordPress? appeared first on Xornor Technologies.

On the other hand, since smartphones have become the biggest source of traffic, most of the website owners are opting for a mobile-friendly design for their websites, so that the users will get the similar experience over their smartphone or other devices as of the desktop. But, while taking the first step towards mobile-friendliness, one question pops in every website owner’s mind, “which is better? Responsive or Adaptive web design?”

Responsive and adaptive web design, both are different terms for mobile-friendliness of a website and diversifies from each other with a little variation. Both have been developed just to provide the users with the best user experience on different devices, and in both cases, the Google’s search ranking algorithm website is made to adjust itself according to the width of the device.

The Definition: Both, RWD and AWD, are the same in a way that these are made to adapt to the size of the device screen. But both are designed differently and has the definitions of their own.

Responsive Web Design (RWD): It has not been even a decade since the term Responsive was formed. The word responsive was first introduced in 2010, by Ethan Marcotte, a web designer and developer, in his book, Responsive Web Design and implies to the adjustment that a website does to fit in a device screen with the help of creative use of CSS.

In simple terms, a responsive web design, ‘responds’ to the different browsers on the different screen sizes by adjusting its layout with the environment, at any given point. Responsive design is based on the following technical elements:

• Fluid Grids
• Flexible Images
• Media Queries

Adaptive Web Design (AWD): Adaptive web design though is similar to the responsive design and is also created to enhance the user experience it differs from the other with a slight difference.

The adaptive design as the name suggests adapts to the screen size, but of a pre-defined width. This type of web design has a limitation of adaption to the fixed screen width, according to which it adjusts its layout in order to optimize the website design for the users.

The six most common screen width which it readjusts with includes:

• 320 pixels
• 480 pixels
• 760 pixels
• 960 pixels
• 1200 pixels
• 1600 pixels

The website is made to adjust itself through the media queries for the mentioned screen widths. Though you can also add other screen sizes, depending upon the devices you want to run the website on.

How the Two Differ from Each Other?

1. The major difference between RWD and AWD is that the former is smoother than the latter. The responsive design smoothly changes with every screen size, whereas AWD’s working is limited to the specific six types (can be extended) of screen sizes. When changing the device width, the adaptive website design seems to snap from a specific device width to the other.
2. RWD is more sorted and fluid. It is flexible and adapts to the browser environment independent of the screen size, whereas the AWD changes its size to specific browser widths only. For AWD, you need to create different CSS for the website design for separate screen sizes.
3. RWD needs more efforts in terms of CSS coding and creating a whole framework. But in the case you go for readymade frameworks, like Bootstrap, it will be a time-saving choice for your website. On the other hand, since AWD is always created manually, the whole control is in the hand of the designer, and since the coding has to be only for six or more screen sizes, it does not take many efforts.

Advantages of AWD over RWD: AWD is suitable for the already designed websites, but not limited to that. You can use it for the new website as well. Since there are only six viewports (can be reduced or extended) for which you need to do the CSS, the time consumed in the process is way lesser. On the other hand, RWD is always best for the websites that you need to create from scratch, as you will need to use and then re-use some specific classes to make the website fully responsive.

Advantages of RWD over AWD: RWD uses grids and has the fluid design, so it fits like water in a container to every screen size, whereas AWD is less flexible. Though RWD takes a lot of efforts in the coding process, it is better for the long run, as we do not need to put any extra CSS to make it compatible with new screen sizes. But for AWD, this is not the case. The web design will only be compatible with the screen sizes with the media queries.

Which is Better?: According to Google’s search ranking algorithm, even Google prefers mobile-friendly websites over ordinary websites. So building a responsive or the adaptive website design will only bring you the best results in terms of rankings and search results.

Even though both of the website designs are built for the websites to fit in different screen sizes, the slight difference between the two will surely make you think which to opt and which to leave.

In our opinion, if you are trying to build a new mobile-friendly website, you must go for the responsive design, as it is more flexible and best for every screen size. But if you want to make your current or a new website to run on a few specific devices, you can opt for AWD.

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But later, with the emergence of Smartphones, people became more active on them and were not ready to follow up with the same distorted design of the websites for the smaller screens. So the web designers started to build different versions of the same website such that the design could fit into all screen sizes. But it too was not very convenient, as it sometimes caused confusion during the maintenance of the design and the database, of the site.

It’s not more than a decade since we have been listening to the word Responsive. Responsive web design is built with a collection of reusable HTML5 classes, CSS code and JavaScript, such that the design can fit the different screen sizes and resolutions. This is the method that saves a lot of time and effort as you do not have to create different web designs for every single screen. There are many other benefits too, that has made this technology so popular, some of which are as follow:

1. Faster Development: Being a single design for every other screen sizes, the development is much faster than creating different versions of the website. It clearly saves a lot of time, and the website is ready in one go, with lesser efforts.

2. Easy Maintenance: As a single design goes for all the screen sizes, updating any information in the database or modifying the design is much easier. As in a non-responsive design, you need to make changes to every version of the website which can be more hectic as well as confusing. But in the case of the responsive web design, you need to make changes to single web design, and it is applied to all screen sizes.

3. More Mobile Traffic: The Smartphones have turned the entire big world into a smaller one, and thanks to the responsive design that people are able to access the information quickly on them. The ease, it provides to the users, has encouraged many other people to go handy by accessing information through mobiles and tablets, resulting in more mobile traffic on the websites.

4. Better SEO: Since there is a single website, you do not have to manage the SEO for different versions of it. Every time you optimize your website and do something to boost the SEO, it is automatically applied to all the screen sizes. There is no possibility of content duplication, and the website will be ranked higher in mobile searches as well.

5. Better Customer Experience: What is better than being able to access a whole lot of world with your fingertips. That is what goes with the customers too. If you have created a responsive website for your business, your customers will be more comfortable in accessing it where ever they want to, independent of the screen size they are using, resulting in better user experience for them.

6. Reduces Bounce Rate: Since people are more active on their Smartphones, they, automatically, tend to look for information over their phone, in the first place. So if you do not have a responsive website, the user will not stay longer on it, as there will be poor design visibility over the phone. This will cause more bounce rate, and as a result, Google may think that your content has no value. But a pleasant responsive design will make people stay on the website longer, reducing the bounce rate.

7. Google Loves Responsive Design: Google has updated its search engine algorithm and has also included the responsiveness into it. As a result, Google searches now give more preference to the responsive websites. In 2015, Google had announced that the mobile-friendly websites would have better search engine rank in the Google searches. Hence, making a responsive website also helps you with your website’s Google rank.

8. Reduces Cost: It is quite apparent to estimate that adopting responsive web design over a non-responsive one will cut down a large amount of development and maintenance cost. When the developer would work on single web design instead of four (let’s say) different versions of the same website, it will automatically cost you almost one-third (or maybe one-fourth) of the total amount you would have spent on a non-responsive website design.

The world today has gone all mobile, so if you also want to walk with the changing trends of the world, you must go for a responsive website in order to grab more traffic to your website and earn more profits from it.

Contact us, to know more about the responsive web design and development process, and get your responsive website built by the professional team of Xorrnor Technologies.

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