Today’s generation is living in a world where everything is changing quickly, technologies are improving and changing day by day, businesses are expanding and growing widely. People usually try their best to expand, maintain, improve size, popularity, increase the value of the brand, and bring ahead their business from other competitors. The website plays an important role in increasing the growth of the business. Website is the best way to attract more customers or audience that in turn increase user experience. Nowadays, people mostly use mobile phones to view websites as it is easy to carry anywhere. Therefore, it is very essential to build a website that not only looks good on desktop or laptop but also looks good on mobile phones and tablets. This is where responsive web design comes in. Responsive web design is basically designing a website that not only looks good on a desktop but also resizes itself according to the screen size it is viewed on. It not only looks good and fits the screen size, but the quality of content and other elements is also maintained and increase user experience. Therefore, it is essential to develop a responsive website or convert a website into a responsive one. But it’s not necessary that all websites should be converted into responsive ones. Every business has different needs and requirements. Therefore, before choosing any web design, determine what are your needs and web design can be beneficial or not. There are several advantages and disadvantages of responsive web design that can help in making decisions. Some of them are given below:
Advantages
- User experience friendly: Responsive web design is specially designed to respond according to customer’s or user’s behaviors and their needs, according to screen size, etc. It is used to create a website that adjusts smoothly to different screen sizes especially for mobile viewing. Therefore, it increases reach to customers and users on small devices like mobiles, tablets, etc.
- SEO friendly: Responsive websites are generally responsible for ranking top at SEO (Search Engine Optimization). On mobile devices or small devices, a responsive website loads much faster as compared to a desktop or laptop. This automatically increases positive user experience that in turn gives a higher ranking to the website on SEO.
- Increase profit and sale: Responsive web design is easy to create and faster to implement. This is because there is no requirement for another website for small devices. A responsive website is specially designed to fit all screen sizes. Therefore, one can save time, effort, maintenance costs and development cost associate with creating another website for small devices. It generally increases user experience and reaches more audiences through small devices. More will be an audience, more will be profit and sale.
- Low maintenance: Responsive websites are designed to fit all screen sizes. There is no change in content and other elements to fit on a different device. This website uses the same content across all devices. There is only one website that fits all screen sizes so the cost of maintaining two websites is also saved because maintaining a separate site for a small device requires a lot of testing and support. Managing a single website requires less maintenance, less cost, saves time, etc.
- Easy to track users: Responsive websites take less time to load, saves time, money, save development effort of creating another website for small devices. One can use this time and effort to track their site visitors.
Disadvantages
- Slow page loading: Though, responsive websites are easy to maintain, but it sometimes takes a long time to load the page. It includes some high-resolution images and videos that sometimes require a lot of time to load.
- Navigation is tough: Responsive websites are specially designed to fit on small devices. But maintaining the simplicity of large websites for small devices sometimes becomes difficult. This is because small devices have less screen size and this turn make it more difficult to navigate website through small devices.
- Time-consuming development: Responsive websites are essential but take a lot of time in the development process as compared to the development time of normal websites.