3. It Reduces Bounce Rate
On mobile devices, users are looking for a website that is easy to use and read. If users have a bad experience, they are likely to return back to the search results - looking for a more user-friendly website. This in turn increases your bounce rate. Google wants you to provide a better user experience. Therefore, it will give more preference to sites where users will not back out to the search results page.
A responsive site will allow you to ensure that your website is being viewed optimally across all devices so you can control what a users sees on specific devices. This will allow you to tailor the experience to reduce bounce rates and increase the overall user experience.
4. It Avoids Duplicate Content
Having two websites (even on a subdomain that you own) has the potential to produce duplicate content. If you go the responsive route, you won’t get penalized for having the same content on your mobile site versus your desktop site.
Besides dealing with duplicate content to search engines, you might also have to manage content in two places. This could be bothersome as you will always need to make sure content is updated on both sites.
5. It’s Easier to Track
If you are tracking your website visitors in Google Analytics, it already provides you with detailed information on your mobile users. If you force your users off to a mobile website, you are breaking that tracking (or at the very least making things more difficult) so you will not have a uniform data set to analyze. Responsive design websites keep your analytics data uniform and all in one place without any potential hiccups in the data.
6. It’s the Future
Responsive website design is the future. It keeps the user experience in one flow and keeps visitors engaging with your website on multiple levels. With so many web designers and search engines preferring responsive design, it’s something that you’ll have to address at some point in the future. Why not address it now!
Creating a Responsive Site
For tips on how to create a responsive site, read our blog on making a mobile responsive site with Bootstrap.
Web Development
About the author
Alex Vilmur
Alex Vilmur is a wizard at development and also trumpet. He once auditioned for The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, but found his passion for website development and Umbraco made it too hard to leave.