What Is Responsive Web Design? And How It Works

I will also present some examples of responsive sites and how they provide an improved user experience. A responsive website automatically changes to fit the device you’re reading it on. You can achieve a consistent website experience across all devices with a simplified, mobile-friendly site.

You can use it together with media queries to only import CSS rules when specific conditions are met. Take a look at this guide to grid properties to see how you can further modify a grid layout. For instance, if you set flex-direction to column, the items how to design website will be placed vertically from top to bottom. It can help arrange the items so that smaller ones take less space and bigger ones take up more. They can be displayed as a single row or multiple rows corresponding to the decreasing of available space.

What is Responsive Design?

The crucial problem solved by setting the viewport and adjusting the page’s contents to match it is that users prefer to scroll websites vertically. A horizontal scrollbar and having to zoom in or out to see some page elements can easily result in a negative user experience. With the meta viewport tag, the site can reshuffle the content to adjust to different screen sizes, be it a smaller smartphone screen or a large desktop monitor. The rise of mobile devices is just the start of a trend toward more comfortable web usage. As wearables such as smartwatches become more popular, it’s critical to ensure that your website can be read on any device by your users. BrowserStack offers a number of the latest real devices on which to check how a website looks, and if it is responsive enough.

Mobile responsive design is all about automatically delivering your audience the content they want, within the context that they’re viewing it. Mobile responsive design takes care of this all “on the fly”, and without multiple versions of your site to maintain. A mobile-friendly website is one that is designed to work the exact same way across devices. This means that nothing changes or is unusable on a computer or mobile device. Features like navigation drop-downs are limited, as they can be difficult to use on mobile.

Using viewport units for responsive typography

If you don’t want to spend time remaking your site with flexbox in mind, there are plenty of responsive site templates you can use as a base, including many free ones. Many templates that you https://deveducation.com/ can use with managed hosting providers (GoDaddy, SquareSpace, Wix, etc.) will be responsive out of the box. The text size can be set with a “vw” unit, which means the “viewport width”.

• As more users spend time on all types of screens, more and more websites make a strategic effort to adapt to various screen sizes.
• Similar to the other contents of a webpage, it’s important to ensure that buttons are visible and accessible to the user.
• If you have a question related to whether or not you should plan for a responsive web design, feel free to contact us at and we’d love to have a casual chat and answer your questions.
• At the bare minimum, we should shift towards the responsive design, and ideally start making plans to transition to a Progressive Web App (PWA).

Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach to make web pages render well on all screen sizes and resolutions while ensuring good usability. In this article, we’ll help you understand some techniques that can be used to master it. For example, Mobile users are often very impatient and want the content to load quickly. This makes them prone to abandoning a website if it takes too long to load, while desktop users are more likely to wait. This means that a fast loading time would be beneficial when creating a mobile responsive web application.

Google can also crawl the content more efficiently and save resources. Googlebot does not need to crawl the page multiple times to get all versions of the content. This approach is also less prone to errors and common mobile design mistakes. The implementation does not require the maintenance necessary in configurations using different URLs or those that use redirects and different code. As Responsive Web Design uses a single URL for all site versions, users can easily navigate the site, share, and link to the content.

Regardless of your brand or your industry, you know that a large percentage of your website traffic is coming from mobile. You simply cannot lose that much of your audience because your site looks awful on a phone! It’s time to graduate from mobile-friendly sites because most time, mobile-friendly isn’t actually friendly for the user at all. At the bare minimum, we should shift towards the responsive design, and ideally start making plans to transition to a Progressive Web App (PWA). A PWA will allow a company to take the rich functionality of a native app and combine it with the discoverability and speed of the internet to produce an incredible mobile experience for the user. When was the last time you needed an answer to something quickly, and you pulled out your phone and searched the web for immediate results?