Every business’s website needs to be able to respond to the screen of its users. Whether the business is a small, local business or an international conglomerate, it is important that their website is easily viewable by all their potential clients. There are many dangers that businesses expose themselves to if they fail to integrate a responsive design. They may lose market share, decrease conversion rates, and fall further down in organic search results. Businesses need to understand just how drastically a responsive design can influence the success they can develop from their online presence.
If a user has trouble finding what they need on a business’s site, 61% of them will immediately move on to the next site (Ewer, 2016). And worse, more than half of them say that it decreases the odds of them doing business with that first company in the future following a bad user experience (Ewer, 2016). Businesses cannot afford to risk losing 61% of any market share. This is especially true of the mobile market because having a responsive design increases conversion rates. Local businesses need to be mindful of this because nearly four in five local, mobile searches end in an offline purchase at a local business (Hill, 2015). And 63% of shoppers make purchases based on research that they’ve done on their mobile devices (Ewer, 2016). And for online purchases, nearly half of all smartphone users have made purchases on the phone that they use to research products (What is importance, 2016).
The way that internet users have been accessing the internet is moving more towards mobile and has recently overtaken desktop usage (Ewer, 2016). Mobile internet usage has increased by 16% since 2010 (What is importance, 2016). And though users were visiting sites on their mobile devices in a vertical view at a rate of only 5% in 2010, that rate increased by 24% over the course of 5 years (Ewer, 2016). In 2014, 25% of internet users only accessed the internet through mobile devices (Rampton, 2014).
Another point that businesses need to keep in mind is how the internet itself treats responsive designs. Most of a business’s site traffic comes from search engine results and social media (Hill, 2015). Search engines prefer sites that have responsive designs and the way they display search results reflect that, with “Mobile-Friendly” designs having priority over other sites (Ewer, 2016). It is also important that the business’s website description itself is mobile-friendly because 25% of all searches are done on mobile devices (Hill, 2015). Having a responsive design is one of the easiest ways to increase a business’s placement in organic search results (Rampton, 2014). The other major source of traffic, social media, also leans heavily on responsive sites. Since 80% of Facebook users only use Facebook through a mobile device (Hill, 2015), if they travel to an advertised site they will expect that site to be responsive as well.
Every business’s website needs to be responsive. Without a responsive website, businesses expose themselves to the danger of losing many potential customers, decreasing conversion rates, and losing ground in search results. By adapting a mobile-friendly site, businesses can increase their ranking in organic search results, increase their conversion rates, and retain and gain new customers.
