5 Responsive Design Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Since 2015 the number of mobile visits to the web surpassed those from desktop machines. The days when online surfing was strictly reserved for desktop or laptop users are gone; today is the era of Responsive web design. With technology making its' presence in almost each household, your website is visible on anything that has a screen i.e. smart watches, desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones. If you ignore these experiences, the effectiveness of your website would be significantly reduced, thereby limiting your online exposure. Whatever type of business you run, you need to have a strong online presence in order to really maximize both your reach and potential.

Obviously, the investment of effort and time required to develop a responsive website is more as compared to its desktop-only counterpart, but the potential and audience gained are immense, as these websites can be accessed anytime and anywhere. However, many developers make certain mistakes while embarking on a responsive web design project. In such cases, it is good to let a company specialized in responsive web design services, handle the task. We’ve searched the web and we’ve come across some common mistakes so here’s the list of them, and how to avoid them.
Let’s dive in.

Improper Testing

Whatever your business is, your website must work without any problems or glitches, and it must work on every device or platform it’s accessed from. One of the biggest mistakes that occur is improper testing of the website on multiple devices or platforms.

Developers can sometimes focus on developing a website like they’re developing it for a single platform. With tight deadlines and schedules sometimes the developers don’t test sites for a number of reasons. Whether it’s because of the resources or improper management, but these websites can seriously harm your online presence.

When you’re choosing a developer for your website, or if you plan to DIY, make sure you know what you want to achieve. There are various free tools that can help you a lot. For business websites developed in WordPress, there’s a virtually endless sea of plugins built specifically to aid in such situations. Always make sure you have properly A/B tested the website, and that you have done so on multiple devices before going online.

Not Analyzing Visitor Behavior

Probably in an excitement and rush to build a good mobile presence, retailers often tend to miss out on visitor behavior. One of the most important things you need to understand is what attracts your visitors’ attention, and what makes them leave. This analysis is extremely critical, especially for responsive web design, since it reveals many statistics such as highly performed operations, frequently used devices, conversion rates, issues raised by buyers and much more. You need to consider all this to perfectly meet the needs of your beloved visitors.

Make enticing CTAs, create offers, do a sale, or give a gift. Whatever you choose to do, do it in such a way so it’s clear and easily accessible over any device or platform. Consult the professionals and maximize the potential your online presence can provide.

Excess of Resources

One of the more detailed studies has shown that an average e-commerce website uses about 87 different resources. Once you start thinking about how much loading time is needed for such numbers of resources to load, you start understanding why having a surplus of resources isn’t a good idea, when it comes to responsive web design.

With the variety of devices and processing units that operate those devices, you have to think about cutting the loading time to the minimum. Another study showed that 3 seconds of waiting for the site to load throws off a staggering amount of 57% of the users.

You need to make sure that each device gets only the resources it needs for the page to load. You have to find the best way to compress and connect JavaScript and CSS resources like Uglify or SASS. With some smart and properly planned use of resources, your conversion rates can sky-rocket.

Complicated Navigation

When you think of your average website visitor, you must consider their average attention span. It’s usually not very long. If such a visitor enters your website and gets confused with navigation right away, you’ve lost him for good.

Having a unique design is something that a lot of designers and developers try to achieve, but it can end up leaving your site cluttered and confusing. There must be a clear and distinctive purpose for website elements and the content of your site. Think about what you would like to see when you’re looking for something in a hurry. Make things simple, but meaningful, and it will pay off significantly, once your traffic elevates.

Neglected Touch Functions

One of the mistakes that can occur when it comes to adapting your website to a responsive web design is to forget about touch. One of the major characteristics of responsive web design is that it’s based around touch, which is completely different from mouse movement.

There are various sizes for clickable content for various devices and platforms, but you have to take in consideration that touch is a lot less precise than a click, and you need to think about other functions like swiping or pinching as well.

Make sure you are prepared your links, buttons, and CTAs shouldn’t be placed too close to each other. You need to think of implementing various methods of text breaking in order to achieve the best possible results for your business.

Conclusion

With a solid responsive web design, your website can really help you make the difference, there’s no doubt in that, but you have to know exactly what you want. There are a lot of things that you need to take care of, and you must understand what is it exactly that you want to provide for your visitors, but with some planning, careful execution and a lot of testing, you can really use your responsive website to help your business flourish.

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