In recent times it has become extremely important for websites to be mobile friendly.
A responsive website design allows your website to adapt to the different sized monitor or device that it is being viewed on. It does this by altering the appearance and layout of the website so that it can be viewed at the optimum size, often by shrinking menus into clickable drop-down lists, stacking boxes that were formerly in rows and removing large images. A good example of this is on the Cosmic website – if you take a look at our website on a smartphone or tablet, you will notice some considerable changes on the homepage, particularly the three call to action boxes (websites, tech support and digital marketing). You will notice that on the web version they are in a row of three, whereas when shrunk down to tablet these rearrange into a row of two and a row of one, and when going even further down to a smartphone size, they stack into three rows.
A very high percentage of internet users are accessing the web from their smartphone or tablet. This means that if your website is not responsive to these devices, there is a high chance that your website will show up small and scaled down rather than optimised for the device – this forces the user to ‘pinch and zoom’ to read your content which is not a good experience for them.
Responsive templates show to your readers that you have an up-to-date, modern website which is capable of working well with modern and up-to-date technology – this will provide an overall better browsing experience for the user making it much easier for them to navigate your website.
Not only this, but Google is now taking a new metric into account when delivering search results; this is part of what’s known as SEO (search engine optimisation). Google now favours responsive websites due to them having one URL and being mobile friendly rather than having a separate mobile site. The new additions to it's search algorithm have been dubbed '#Mobilegeddon' on social media.
To check if your website is mobile friendly, simply go to Google's Mobile-Friendly testing site at www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly and enter your website address. This will analyse your website and let you know if your website is mobile friendly or not.
If you get the message you see above, you're all good! If it says anything else, you should consider contacting your web developer and ask about having your website made mobile friendly.