Why Responsive Web Design Is Better Than a Separate Mobile Site

Look around you. What do you see? Specifically, what devices are people carrying about? Laptops or smartphones? Tablets or phablets? Minis or netbooks? Chances are most people have their smartphones, followed by their tablets and for those who have it, phablets. This basically tells you that the world is crazy about mobile. As a smart and savvy business person, this should be of interest to you.

According to BIA/Kelsey, over 25% of all searches on the search engines were done on mobile devices last year. In the US, over 91% of the population owns a smartphone with over 300 million subscriptions. Those are huge figures. So, any business owner who isn’t tapping into mobile is leaving tons of cash on the table.

The thing about mobile however, is that you need a website that renders properly or is built for the mobile devices. This is usually different from the standard website. So, to create a mobile version of your website, there are two options to consider:

1. A Separate Hosted Mobile Website
2. A Responsive Web Design

What’s The Difference Between These Two And Which Is Better?

The responsive web design is configured or designed to automatically detect the device and adapt to the screen. So, assuming you did a search for a Jacksonville web design service on your mobile device, the website will render the site so it fits your screen. You won’t have to start scrolling sideways or up and down to get the site to fit into your screen.

A separate hosted mobile site on the other hand is not that intuitive. If you were to do a quick search for “custom web designer in Jacksonville” for example, on visiting the website from a mobile device, you’ll get the notification to either choose the mobile site or the full site. Research has shown that three out of every five visitors will often choose to visit the full site from their mobile device. This is bad for your business because if the full site doesn’t render properly, they’ll leave and go elsewhere.

So, your best bet really is to go for a responsive web design. The benefits of responsive web design are many:

Google Loves Responsive Web Design

In fact, Google has a best practices document on this. Bottom line, Google will rank an averagely optimized responsive web designed site ahead of a highly optimized separately hosted mobile website. This is because they believe that in this case, that the responsive site provides better user experience than a website that has to ask people to choose. Also, since the content on separately hosted mobile sites are often a little different from the main site, Google prefers the single content option of a responsive website because it’s generally easier to share.

One SEO or Paid Search Campaign

If you’re doing any SEO at all, a responsive website is generally best. There won’t be any need for multiple SEO campaigns as against separately hosted mobile sites. It’s often easier to just manage one campaign than to manage two. Bottom line, you’ll be saving a lot of money and time and focusing on optimizing your campaigns.

Flexible and Forward Thinking

What do you think about never having to rebuild or recode your website in the future? This is what responsive web design does for you. It is forward thinking and will automatically adapt to new and future devices. A separately hosted website on the other hand will most assuredly need to be coded again and the website probably built from scratch.

So, take advantage of the huge benefits associated with responsive mobile web design. If you’re a business owner around the Jacksonville and greater Florida area who needs more clarification and information, contact BCP Digital Marketing your local Jacksonville web designer. We’ll explain and show you real live examples.