Although it can be said that it is not suitable for everyone, responsive web design represents a very important trend in website creation nowadays. While some people decide on a responsive design for speed, others simply want a website design that appears to be the same on all devices.

Millions of smartphones are activated daily and increasingly more users use mobile internet. According to Statcounter, internet traffic is generated at a 17.4% rate from mobile devices in 2013 as compared to 6% in 2012. These statistics are very suggestive regarding the future of web design and the fact that websites should be optimized for both smartphones and tablets.

The explosion in the number of mobile devices has made the initial web design world to move toward creating mobile versions of websites to cover the market of users. But the problem with this solution was the splitting of a website in multiple versions for each device and as such duplicate content.

So finally another solution appeared. Using responsive design for speed one can greatly boost the loading time of a selected page. Furthermore, created websites will adapt to device’s resolution thus making the entire contents visible and more easily navigable. While this technique is still evolving, it is very interesting to see the SEO and speed benefits that it brings:

Google recommends it

Google has stated that recommends that web designers to implement responsive web design techniques and use the same HTML on all devices and use CSS3 media queries to decide how to display items on each device. In terms of SEO, this method will help the website to get better ranking since all the link juice will be focused on a single URL, instead of one for each type of mobile device.

Rejoice from lower rejection rate (bounce rate)

The main aim of responsive web design is to improve user experience, the ease with which they can surf the web, read, view and interact with content. If a website looks, adapt, loading and behave satisfactorily, users will spend more time on the site and will interact more with him, improving bounce rate, which is a good thing in terms of SEO.

Basically, if you have a mobile version of the website which is very different from the desktop to the same site, loading heavy or you have no website optimized for mobile devices for visitors to be unhappy and will leave the site.

In fact, Google has announced that mobile optimized websites will have priority in the search display on mobile search engine.

Save time and effort in terms of SEO

Anyone who has worked or working in this field will tell you that SEO is a process that consumes a lot of effort and requires significant financial resources. Optimizing a website is so difficult to repeat the same process for each device has no effect. Luckily responsive web design technique, portfolio links to your website will take effect regardless of the device used to view it.

Simplified updates

If you have multiple versions of a website then most definitely the update process to create new functionality becomes extremely difficult and time consuming. Moreover, you can hit and some problems in terms of SEO. Using responsive web design techniques, you have a secure website updated and therefore, less likely to make major mistakes.

One can use Google Analytics to study users’ behaviour on mobile devices. The standard documents can be found under Reports> Public> Mobile> Devices.

Summary

Overall, responsive design for speed becomes more and more important for web admins as time passes by. A website that cannot be successfully rendered on a mobile device or it is too slow to load risks losing plenty of visitors in the long run.