Would you love your website to look great with a stunning and richer user experience across all devices, platforms, and screen sizes?
It’s easy to conclude that you need such a website because of smartphones and tablets users. Period. But you should look beyond the current devices and imagine future devices such as smartwatches, Google glass, virtual and augmented reality, or any other new devices tech experts may throw at us. Responsive websites and development will work for them too. Let’s see how important responsive HTML websites are.
The Importance of Responsive HTML Websites
Here are key reasons why you need a responsive HTML website:
1. Mobile usage is on the rise
More and more people are embracing mobile devices worldwide. Currently, there are 6.2 billion smartphone subscription globally, according to Tech Crunch. In the United States, more than 58 percent of adults own a smart device and almost 60 percent of website traffic is from mobile devices.
Worldwide, mobile usage continues to grow. So every day, every hour, minute or second, more and more customers or prospects will view your website on a mobile device. If all you can offer is a user-experience only on traditional desktop devices, they wouldn’t hesitate to consider your competitor’s website.
But if you have a responsive website, you’d be proud to offer your website’s visitors a very rich user-experience. They’ll be able to access all your website content exactly the way you want, regardless of the mobile devices they are using. Having a responsive design is one easy way to boost your site’s traffic.
2. Search engines love responsive websites
What’s the essence of having a website if your product users and prospects can’t find you via a search engine? In fact, responsive development is search engine giant Google’s recommended approach for mobile design. According to Google, responsive websites perform better in search rankings because they provide a richer user-experience compared to sites that are not mobile friendly.
This is exactly why HelpNDoc is designed with built-in SEO friendly HTML code, it can generate SEO-friendly URLs making it easier for web crawlers to crawl your responsive site thereby increasing your site’s visibility and ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs). Wouldn’t you love to rank on Google’s first page of search result for your industry’s leading keyword?
3. Responsive HTML website consolidates your analytics and reporting
Having a single responsive web site means you no longer have to worry about tracking your site’s visitor’s journey, conversion paths, funnels and redirections between different designs of your web site. Leading analytics tools such as Google analytics are optimized to handle multiple devices and responsive reporting.
In fact, all your tracking and analytics will function appropriately and be condensed into a single report for easier monitoring and analysis. You wouldn’t have to bother about tracking multiple designs of your site to reach a reasonable conclusion. Most help authoring tools provide a way to add Google Analytics to online HTML documentations to track page views.
4. Save time and cost on site development and management
One of the key benefits of having a responsive web site design is that it takes less time to create compared to creating an additional stand-alone mobile site. Also, testing across multiple sites increases development, support and maintenance cost.
You’ll also find it easier and less time consuming to manage and maintain a single site. You’ll have less content to manage. Also, a single administrative interface is easier to optimize, using layout and workflow tools to manage the content, and interact with your product users.
5. Enhance user’s offline browsing experience
Having a responsive design will allow you to deliver quality content to visitors across devices and the offline browsing capabilities of HTML5 mean that sites can be easily accessed “on the go.”
As HTML5 compatible tablets and smartphones thrive, this will become increasingly crucial. Content such as email newsletters, online help files, manuals, user guides and documentations as well as content contained in hybrid HTML5 web applications will be consumed more on the move and without an internet connection.
6. Future Scalability
Technology is dynamic, and one of the key things about having a responsive website is that it gives you the best chance to support newer devices and screen sizes in the future. You don’t need five different site designs to fit into five different screens. Responsive sites are flexible, and you can scale them up or down as required to best fit the screens been used to access the site.
This simply means that as newer devices are released into the market, with new screen sizes other than existing ones, the responsive design will already be equipped to meet those new devices with a design and user-experience best suited for such screen sizes.
7. Mobile devices increase social sharing
More than 55 percent of social media consumption now takes place on mobile devices. So sharing links from social media sites such as YouTube, Google+, Twitter, Facebook etc. to your site will boost your traffic and viewing of your site via mobile devices. This means if you have a social media marketing strategy and intends to leverage social sharing, it’s time for you to get responsive.
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