‍Website Responsiveness: A Definition

Responsiveness refers to a website’s ability to respond to the needs and preferences of the user as well as the device being used to access it. A responsive website is a website capable of catering to the needs of any device being used to access it – a website capable of displaying a version of itself suited to the device it is being accessed on. You can use everything from a computer or tablet to a phone or something as small as a smart watch to  access a website, each of which have different capabilities when it comes to displaying and interacting with a website. The goal of responsive web design is to create a website that displays itself accordingly and remains fully functional regardless of the kind of device being used to access it. Responsive web design also covers how well, if at all, elements (tabs, widgets, menus, and buttons) on a website respond to users interacting with them.  

Why You'll Want a Responsive Website

Responsive web design is among the clientele’s top asks today, and here are the most significant reasons why:

A website that can't cater to all devices is a website that loses traffic

The more devices people can access and interact with your website on, the more visitors your website will have. A website being unavailable to people using certain devices does nothing good for the website and simply drives traffic away. A 2018 study came to the conclusion that 52.2% of web traffic during that year originated from mobile devices, and that number has only gone up since then. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you have left a whopping 50% (and probably more) of web traffic totally untapped. We at Syntaxflo place superior importance on making sure your website is available, in its aesthetic and functional entirety, to all of your customers regardless of the device they’re using.  

Absolutely no one likes a website that takes ages to load

What did you do the last time you tried to make your way to a specific website and it took ages to load? That’s right – you found it so frustrating that you stopped trying to get to that website altogether. Here at Syntaxflo, we use Webflow to cater to our clients’ web design needs. Webflow creates concise and un-bloated underlying code for the websites developed on it, allowing us to build websites that include a responsive design and load rather quickly as compared to websites built on other platforms.  

To the user, website responsiveness directly correlates to professionalism

A simple menu or button on your website no longer working when the user switches from their desktop computer to their phone might seem completely understandable from a web development point of view. However, here’s what that says to your user: you have not put in enough effort to make your website usable for all of your users, and you do not care enough. An unresponsive layout for your website damages your image and chips away at the faith your users place in you.  

Responsive websites rank higher

Website Analytics
If making sure your website ranks higher on Search Engine Results Pages is something you want (and let’s be honest here – who doesn’t?), you’ll definitely want a website that’s responsive by design. Search engines rank websites that are mobile-friendly and support a plethora of different devices and screen sizes higher than those that aren’t and don’t.