What is a Responsive Website?
A responsive website is one that responds to different screen sizes, ensuring that it looks just as good on a mobile phone or tablet as it does on a desktop.
Why is Responsiveness Important?
The following graph shows just how much the choice of web browsing device has changed over the last decade:
As you can see, mobile phones overtook desktops five years ago and now stands at 54% compared to desktops at 43% and tablets bringing up the rear at 3%.
Clearly, it’s extremely important that your website looks good on a mobile phone. Add to this the fact that when Google crawls the web to builds its ranking for search results, it now primarily uses the mobile phone view of your website. If the mobile phone view is poor or incomplete, then your site will be penalized in the ranking.
How Can I Test Responsiveness?
So, how can I tell if my website is responsive? As well as actually looking at your website on different devices, there are a number of online tools available. Here are my favourites:
Just type your website URL into any of these, and you can see what it looks like with the different screen sizes.
How Do I Make My Website Responsive?
How you make your website responsive depends upon what development tools you use. If you are using WordPress and Elementor page builder, like I predominantly do, then the editor has the facility to preview different screen sizes and make adjustments.