Date: 12/11/2024
Introduction

What’s the longest you’ve been away from a screen today? An hour or more? Well, that’s unlikely because most of us check our smartphones as regularly as clockwork.

We are all checking screens more often, whether on our smartphones, iPads, tablets, Macbooks, desktops, or reading messages on our Apple smartwatches.

Whether it’s a social media update or a vital work e-mail, shoppers and smartphone users expect the website or mobile app to be responsive. This, in a nutshell, just means automatically adjusting to the screen size and resolution.

Shoppers, therefore, expect the website to snap to that screen size almost instantly. Businesses that fail to do this don’t adjust to the correct screen size. Well, the bounce rate is likely to go through the roof, and if sustained for long enough, the business has no chance, no chance at all, of getting on page one of Google.

So, if that wasn’t clear enough about why you need a responsive website for your business, we will hammer home the point even more. We’re not really; we want to give you the info you need to ensure your Cardiff web design team designs a well-designed website that should work across various devices.

Over half of visitors now come via a mobile device.

Plumber, hairdresser or solicitor practice, no business can afford to turn away half of its visitors to its website. Yet, unless you have a responsive website, this is precisely what you do. Plus, as soon as Google crawls and indexes the website and sees no mobile version of the website designed, this will result in lower search engine rankings.

Let’s reword that: your business might now appear in the mobile results if you don’t have a responsive website. So now, with over 55% of organic traffic coming via mobile devices, your business in 2024 must have a well-designed, mobile version of the website. And with web design businesses, like W&P, offering to design mobile responsive websites for as little as £950.00- well, there’s no excuse why your website

is not mobile-ready already- even rhymes.

Out the window with fixed width layouts

So, back in the day, we remember when our company owner, over twenty years old, designed his first website. It meant using fixed-width layouts and stating how long a wireframe section should be. This then got replicated on the shoppers’ desktop screen.
Well, I had a mobile responsive website that changed all of that completely.

So whether it’s a 4 K desktop monitor or a small iPhone screen, your website must work on various screen sizes. The width can’t be fixed anymore; the website must be responsive.

Google rolled out mobile-first indexing.

Google has made it clear that it wants a company website to be mobile-ready and responsive. It rolled out its mobile-first indexing update in 2018.

This means, in a nutshell, that the mobile version of the website, such as that new blog post you’ve just added to, will get indexed first. If your website is not responsive and mobile-ready, it will likely have seen a massive ranking drop since 2018.

This was when businesses in Cardiff and globally dashed to get on the phone with their web designers to make their websites mobile-responsive. It was dubbed at the time Mobilegeddon—a bit dramatic, we know.

Millions of businesses feared they would be left behind unless their websites were mobile-ready. However, many were already mobile-ready. For example, the countless WordPress websites we designed for many Cardiff businesses were responsive before the update.

Fluid grids are now the way forward.

Fluid grids are now the way forward. Remember early on in this article that we mentioned fixed widths and why this doesn’t make the website responsive?

Well, our web developers and designers are using fluid grids, which fix the issue by using percentage-based widths for your website rather than having them set in stone and fixed with pixel values. So, nearly all of most websites will now use fluid grids rather than fixed widths.

Hire W&P to design your responsive website today.

Our digital marketing agency can design a brand-new and impressive WordPress website for your business and offer SEO services. Most of our brochure websites can be live and completed in less than three weeks. Therefore, if you’re looking for a local web design agency, why not call us today?