PROS & CONS of Responsive Web Design
For the past 9 years, North Texas Web Design has proudly developed custom websites for many clients. In recent years, we began including WordPress designs, primarily because they do so well from an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) perspective.
Over the past 2+ years, when developing a WordPress site for a client, we’ve exclusively developed “responsive” websites. As we’ve talked with prospective clients, we’ve found most are clueless as to what “responsive” means. In this article, we attempt to provide a few answers about the PROS and CONS of responsive website designs.
To start with, you may have heard that if you don’t have a responsive website, you won’t be found on search engines. This is completely untrue, but if you read our complete article, you’ll learn that Google does “prefer” responsive designs.
Let’s look at the different types of web design and specifically what Google recommends, and in doing so, what this may mean for you as a business owner.
First of all, what are the different types of mobile design?
Responsive Website Design – The website uses the same URL on all devices. The website serves the same content to any device but will automatically change the view and order depending on the size of the device. In other words, it rearranges the content to fit onto any screen size. Responsive design is client-side rendering. This means the browser will have to download the entire web page, then resize it according to the screen size.
Adaptive Website Design – The website uses the same URL on all devices. The server (where the website is hosted) detects the device whether it is a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop, then loads the version of the site that is optimized for that device. In other words, only mobile-optimized assets are downloaded. This method is the server-side approach, because all the work is done by the servers before it even reaches the client.
Separate Mobile Website – The website has a separate URL for the mobile website. Sometimes you may see the website it as a sub-domain of your regular domain name. These different URLs are usually optimized for mobile devices, and often are optimized for specific mobile devices. In other words, the site may be optimized differently for an iPhone than a Samsung Galaxy.
You can also have a site that mixes the different methods. An example of this would be having a responsive design for the PC and tablet, and then loading a separate mobile website for mobile devices.
Google supports smartphone-optimized sites of all three configurations. Your Google rankings will not be affected if you don’t have a responsive design. However, Google does prefer responsive design because the Google bots have less pages to index which means it is easier for the search engines to crawl your site. For more on why this is, see https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details.
So as I noted at the outset of this article, your website will not be affected if you don’t have a responsive design. Having said this, there are advantages and disadvantages to each method, and you should carefully consider methods according to what you want to accomplish.
Responsive Design Advantages:
- One URL makes it easy for users to interact with the website.
- If built properly, responsive design automatically adjusts to whatever device the user is using.
- When making changes to your site, you only have to make those changes in one place instead of two if you have a separate mobile website.
Responsive Design Disadvantages:
- You have to change your entire existing website.
- Because responsive designs are more complex and require more code, there is much more to building them. As such, responsive designs almost always tend to cost more.
- All content is downloaded whether it is used or not. This means that if you have a large slideshow, it will have to download the entire full size slideshow to the mobile phone, then resize it.
- Pages can load slower; full-size images are downloaded, then resized to fit the device.
Adaptive Design Advantages:
- One URL makes it easy for users to interact with the website.
- Adaptive loads much faster because the server pushes only the needed information to the mobile device.
- Adaptive can adapt if you have different needs for mobile devices than on a desktop
Adaptive Design Disadvantages:
- Have to build a separate site.
- Requires more website maintenance ( this maintenance should be done by your webmaster)
Separate mobile site advantages:
- You don’t have to create a new website to add a mobile website.
- If built properly, the mobile site can load very fast.
Separate mobile site disadvantages:
- Different URLs can make it harder for users to interact with website.
- May need to be redirected, which slows down site.
- Requires more website maintenance
In the opinion of North Texas Web Design, responsive designs are MUST. More and more people are searching the web, including eCommerce stores, using smartphones and tablets. Having a responsive design means your website will accommodate any and all browsers and devices, and in our opinion, is going to be more and more important to Google in the years to come.
For any questions about responsive website designs, please contact North Texas Web Design.