Top 5 Responsive Web Design Tactics that Will Go a Long Way to Increase Your Web Conversions

We live in an era, an age where smartphones and tablets have already taken over our everyday life. Now in a world with smartphones being such an indispensable part of our lives, it would be only challenging for any non-responsive website to make it through the competitive ecommerce space.

Responsive Web Design (RWD) and Conversions

“Why is it a must for ecommerce marketers today to have a responsive website?"

Simply, a responsive web design makes your website look good and functional on all screen sizes or devices. Given the fact that mobile usage is on the rise and an overwhelming number of internet users browse websites on their mobiles devices, the lack of a responsive design implies loss of traffic and prospects. 

In order to maximise the capability of your ecommerce website to not just drive traffic but retain traffic and promote conversion, it is necessary that it is designed to accommodate a variety of possible screen sizes. 

Online buyers today have way too many options to meet their shopping needs and wants. If they find your website difficult and inconvenient to access and use, they would quickly leave your website and might end up on your competitors’ website. Making your website easily navigable will increase the possibilities for your visitors to send more time on your site, look around, click pages and links and do favourable actions.     

In addition, gathered below are a few vital considerations that will help ensure the effectiveness of responsive website development approach.  

Make Mobile-Centric Design the Standard Approach

When building a responsive web design, mobile devices should be the highest priority. Though desktops and laptops are a commonly used device for online shopping, mobile phones still maintain an edge over other devices when it comes to the most sought after device for internet browsing and other online activities.

In addition, starting with the smallest screen relevant to your audience should be a basic practice. This way you would be able to easily scale your website to larger screens and optimise it for a seamless user experience.

Content that Goes with Your Responsive Design

One of the best things about RWD (responsive web design) is that it allows you to highlight the foremost content on the website regardless of the screen it is being displayed on.

For strategic responsive design and conversion optimisation, prioritise the most appropriate and essential information and fields that you want to be on the top of your website. This will make sure the visitor’s attention is immediately grabbed at what can provoke immediate action or response. 

Design a Layout before the Design

Creating a layout first to scrutinise how your mobile-optimised design should look is an important practice every designer should adhere to. You don’t want to put in your significant time and effort in CSS coding to build a design ends up being rejected by the client.

So, it is advisable to sketch a simple yet functional layout for your mobile web design to give the client an idea how their website is going to look.

Optimise Images

One of biggest challenges faced by designers in responsive website development approach is image optimisation.

Different devices and screen sizes respond to images in different ways. Using appropriate measurements and dimensions and advanced optimisation tools, you must optimise images to adapt to varied screens without losing their quality.

Let Your Responsive Website through Usability Tests

No matter how good you feel and certain about your responsive design, you must let your website through the requisite testing process before you launch it.

Testing your website across varied mobile and desktop browsers will make sure it adapts to different screen sizes and components including content, images and videos are easily accessible to visitors across all platforms.

What not to do in the name of RWD?

Ok. You just learnt what to do when building a mobile-friendly website.

Now, though mobile-friendly approach toward website development work wonders for all kinds of ecommerce businesses regardless of their size, not all responsive websites are developed in a way that helps with the traffic and conversion rate.

This brings into perspective common mistakes designers make when attempting to build an adaptive layout, which unfortunately jeopardise the performance of the website.

Let’s take a glance at some of these blunders you would certainly want to avoid.

• Focusing your efforts on devices instead of screens: There are countless distinct android devices in the market. It is clearly not viable to optimise your website to accommodate individual devices. Hence, it is easier to design for screen sizes. 
• Trying to fit all navigation options on a single screen: Insisting on consistent navigation across different layouts of a responsive website is an absolute mistake. Instead, consider placing all the menus under a main navigation drop down. 
• Hiding content to make the design fit a smaller screen: Not only does this practice create inconvenience for visitors who seek all vital information but it also negatively affects the performance of the website in search engine rankings. 
• Overlooking page load speed and performance: Often designers while creating responsive websites forget that their mobile users might have limited connection to access their website. Besides a responsive design, your website must offer good page load speed and performance.
• Using separate URLS for varied mobile versions of the website: This is one of the easiest way for designers and marketers to wreak havoc on the user experience and performance of their website. Using sub domains for a website means creating multiple versions of your website that surely leaves your website’s SEO in trouble.

With rapidly expanding ecommerce market and constantly evolving technological advances, online shoppers are bound to raise their expectations. Keeping that in mind, ecommerce marketers who wish to stand out with high conversion rates and sales must meet the rising expectations and changing behaviours of customers.

And that can be done by optimising your website for varied devices.

So, go the responsive way and provide your prospects and customers with a fast and seamless user experience while boosting your conversion rates.