2 reasons why we need to have a Responsive Designed website

First of all I’m always surprised to hear how little people in the digital marketing world know very little about Responsive Designed websites: Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors). Wikipedia

So let’s see why it is best to have a Responsive web design vs mobile version website. (A mobile version of your website is a lighter version of your site).

1. Because Google says so!
When Matt Cutts speaks we should listen and take note. If there is anything Matt Cutts knows is what Google likes and cats! Yes you heard me cats but I'll leave that to him. Google stated back in the middle of 2013 that they preferred responsive designed websites. For SEO purpose having one url is just more efficient. Matt Cutts explains this very simply in this video from the end of 2013:

If you love statistics, research and digital marketing you should know that mobile usage will pass that of desktop during 2014. You can read Sophie’s post about that here.

In 2014 there’s increasingly going to be a greater difference between what you see on your desktop and what your searchers will see on their mobile devices. Google has just started to warm up on this one. In 2013 Google announced an upcoming change to their mobile search ranking algorithms geared towards showing a preference for mobile compatible Web sites in their search results also that they prefer mobile solutions that maintain the same URL across platforms. Currently there is not much difference from desktop search and mobile but we are starting to see movement. Here is an example:

Position Explorer Chart. Google UK - FOR NON MOBILE

Position Explorer Chart. Google UK - FOR MOBILE

2. Because users say so!
Analysing one of our customers we noticed a - 91% in sales from direct mobile visits month over month. This is consistent over the first five months of 2014. Organic Mobile visits increased 274% month over month and sales increased 1.484%. (this is a bit deceiving because sales from one year ago during that period was only 127 euro). Over all sales from desktop and tablet have increased during this period. The bounce rate is particularly high from mobile. You will see that if your mobile website has a mobile version. We believe that the desktop customer is not finding a familiar face when wanting to buy from a mobile device. Oh yeah when accessing your site on a mobile device...It better be fast! If it is slow they will abandon you in a heart beat.

What does the Research say? 80% of customers abandon a mobile site if they have a bad user experience (Limelight Networks).

Other interesting data :
• Of the estimated 30 billion annual mobile searches, about 12 billion are local searches (Search Engine Land)
• 89% of consumers use a search engine on their mobile device (Forrester)
• 82% of mobile shoppers use a search engine to influence their purchasing decisions (Google)
• Shopping searches are two times more likely to be performed in-store (Google Mobile Ads)

So really…. a no brainer! Responsive design websites is the way to go!