In case you haven’t heard, having a responsive website is going to be a bigger part of web design moving forward. The common practice in the past was for mobile versions of sites to be given their own subdomain. Essentially, you had two websites with duplicate information and you had twice as much work when you needed to change something. This doubles your development and maintenance costs. It also caused problems when your site was listed in search engines. Now, you could prevent a mobile version of your site from being crawled and listed as a duplicate in search results, then just serve up the mobile version of the site when a mobile browser was detected. However, Google prefers to know exactly what they are serving and a redirect like that is considered bad practice.
Sites with a “mobile version” also had their limitations. They could only support two screen resolutions: desktop and mobile. Using a tablet, you usually ended up with an over sized smartphone version of the site, or you could end up with a desktop version that was still too small. And if you used the built-in browser on your gaming system, all bets were off. It can be tremendously frustrating not only from the side of usability, but also from a design perspective. Good responsive design practice fixes all of this.
Google is trying to unify search results and they have been striving for a consistent user experience across all platforms. For the last few months, websites have been eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label within Google Search results if they use a responsive design. The criteria it uses are things like avoidance of flash and other uncommon software on mobile devices, legible text without zooming, automatic horizontal sizing which is scalable to whatever size screen, and “finger friendly” spacing of links.
This is all great for the end-user, but in the future it could have a big impact on you. Google has been experimenting with the mobile-friendly label in their Search ranking. Sites without a responsive design could be penalized and dropped down the list. It could literally undo the years of hard work on SEO and marketing just by adding a criteria that your site isn’t prepared for.
Luckily, we at 216digital are experts in responsive design and can quickly and efficiently create a responsive version of your website. If you’d like to read more about the mobile-friendly label and responsive design, Google has provided a few resources to help educate you further and we’ve linked them below.
Mobile-friendly Test
Webmasters Mobile Guide
Mobile usability report
How-to guide for third-party software