Why You Need a Responsive Web Design and How to Do It [+ Examples]

 The insights from this article came from the HubSpot Academy's Free Website Optimization Course. Take the full course to learn more about responsive design and how to optimize your website's performance.

Across the world, over 50% of total internet activity is done on mobile devices. Desktops follow behind with a little over 45% of total internet activity, and tablets make up the rest.

Today, with so many people surfing the web from their phones, it's essential to offer a great mobile website experience. Without it, you can't cater to the majority of internet users, and are likely missing out on traffic and leads for your business as a result.

So how do you create an effective mobile experience? That's where responsive design comes in.

Simply put, responsive web design is the method of designing web pages that appear in their optimized form across all devices.

In other words, a responsive design will automatically reformat your website for all screen sizes. This allows your website visitors to easily view and interact with your site no matter what device they're using.

Here, let's explore how responsive design works, and take a look at some examples to inspire your own responsive web design in 2020.

How strong is your website? Grade it using HubSpot's free Website Grader.

How does responsive design work?

A website developed with responsiveness in-mind adjusts to the size of the device and browser to display the content appropriately. Breakpoints are set up to target ranges that define specific displays. For example, you generally see breakpoints for phones, tablets, and desktops.

There are a number of responsive web design best practices to follow:

  1. Buttons: A person's finger is much larger than the pointer on a computer screen. Buttons and hyperlinks should be at least 48 pixels wide and 48 pixels tall to ensure all users can click them.
  2. SVGs: Scalable Vector Graphic Files define an image's shape in terms of vectors, meaning they can scale infinitely without losing quality image quality.
  3. Responsive Images: Not all of your images are going to be SVGs. For these, you'll want to use CSS rules to automatically adjust the dimensions of the image to fit the users' screen size.
  4. Fonts: Make sure that your font is legible across all devices. At a minimum, Google recommends using a base font size of 16 CSS pixels.
  5. Device Features: While prospects and customers can't call you over their computers, they definitely can on their smartphones. Consider changing your “Chat Now!” CTA to “Call Now!” and include your business phone number in lieu of email.
  6. Test: As always, test your responsive website on different devices and browsers. To see how your website is currently performing, check out HubSpot's Website Grader tool.

Responsive Web Design vs. Isolated Mobile Web Pages

There are two major methods for creating mobile websites: responsive design and mobile templates. Responsive design requires you only have one website that is coded to adapt to all screen sizes, no matter the device the website's being displayed on.

In contrast, a mobile template is a completely separate entity requiring you to have a second, mobile-only website or subdomain. Mobile templates are also built for each specific site, not per screen size.

Mobile-only websites can be great solutions for larger applications such as Facebook and Twitter, but for most businesses, a responsive website is much more cost-efficient, and easier to develop and maintain.

Unlike isolated mobile websites, where you create a whole separate version of a website for mobile devices, responsive design adapts the layout to any screen size by using fluid, proportion-based grids. Responsive websites serve the same HTML to all devices and use CSS media queries to change how your website should look on each device.

As the number of people surfing the web from their phones continues to climb, a responsive design will make your life as a marketer easier and your website more effective. A mobile-friendly website will save you money in the long run, deliver a great user experience, and perform better across all devices.

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