Responsive Website vs Mobile Friendly, What’s the Difference?

Does web design have an impact on your business?

Definitely.

There are many elements to web design, but the focus of this post, as you can tell, is about mobile-friendliness of a website, or UX (user experience).

What is UX? User Experience refers to how much users feel satisfied after having visited a website.

Website visitors don’t want to wait 10 seconds for the page to load after they discovered your site in Google or social media.

In recent years we’ve been hearing so much about how websites need to be mobile-friendly with mobile phone usage increasing each year.

Many terminologies such as responsive website, mobile-friendly, mobile optimized, have been thrown around and probably average people or even non-techie bloggers don’t know what the difference is. Hey, a short while ago I didn’t.

Both responsive websites and mobile friendly sites can be viewed on mobile devices for sure. But there are differences.

Do you know what they are? Well, that’s the point of this post.

Mobile Friendly

The term, mobile-friendly, simply means that a site can at least be viewed on mobiles, but it doesn’t promise you the most optimal user experience on every device. Especially today, with technology evolving so fast and new devices released every year. new smartphones you bought last year quickly becomes old.

Depending on how your site was designed, a visitor may have to zoom in and out to read texts, which can be frustrating as heck.

Mobile Site (m dot site)

Mobile website is a more simplified version of your site where complicated charts or large images might be left out. That means you have two different versions of your website, one for desktop and the other for mobile, a stripped-down version of a desktop website.

So, let’s say the URL of your main site is yourwebsite.com.

Then your mobile site’s URL is going to look like:

m.yourwebsite.com

Disadvantages of Mobile Site

The problem with this type of site is that mobile visitors are directed to a mobile site, so traffic is going to be divided, which may not be the best thing for SEO. And you need to manage them separately.

Also, what if someone discovered your site on a mobile, but later on wanted to look at it on a desktop? A user will be looking at a mobile site on a desktop or vice versa.

Responsive Website

A responsive website, just as the name suggests, adjusts the layout according to the screen size and resolution of the device. On mobiles a two or three column layout will become a single column and reading will be breeze as the font size will be also adjusted accordingly.

On mobiles you may have seen a hamburger icon like this.

At the top of your desktop website you have a menu, but on mobiles it is collapsed. If your website is a responsive website or created with a responsive theme, it will be neatly organized like this.

Why Is This Important?

Well, if website visitors are having a hard time navigating your site, like for example, having to zoom in and out to read texts, navigating your site becomes pain in the butt quickly.

Do you think people are going to want to stick around?

So, obviously the design of your website can affect visitors’ behavior and your business on a much larger scale.

Mobile Users on the Rise

It’s not just the number of users that is increasing, but there are more and more variety in each product line such as iPhone, iPad and Android, which come in different models and sizes.

So, having a responsive site is a must if you want your website visitors to have the most optimal viewing experience on your site.

Google Recommends Responsive

A few years ago it seemed mobile sites were still acceptable, but as the number of mobile users increases every year, now having a responsive site is a must.

This is not just from design perspectives because Google recommends a responsive website as it offers more user-friendly experience.

If you want to know more about why Google recommends responsive, you can read it here.

The loading time of a web page and bounce rate are some of the Google’s ranking algorithm. You take these lightly and they could affect your ranking.

So, don’t get left behind and lose website visitors and more importantly, customers.