Responsive Website Design: 10 Tips to Create Mobile-Friendly

Since you have decided to take the heat and design your website on your own for your small business, there is something we can do to help!

If you want to have a responsive website that looks professional and attractive to your visitors, clients, and customers, there are certain hacks to optimize it.

These hacks and tips will make your web design more responsive to visitors and help increase brand awareness by retaining them.

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How to Create a Responsive Website?

Leveraging Visual Hierarchy

A webpage needs to have a visual hierarchy. It is the arrangement, color, size, and contrast of all the visual elements relative to each other to a particular order that the human eye preferably sees it.

Web designers utilize the visual hierarchy to guide their visitor’s attention towards the significant elements first towards the least.

Image Source: Pinterest

It requires your website layout to include various elements such as size, position, color, format, etc managed from low visual prominence to high visual prominence.

The size of a particular text should depend upon what text you want your readers to notice first.

Image Source: Mockplus

All these different aspects amplify the overall visual impact on the reader. It helps the visitors to navigate through content on the website in an effective order.

Visual hierarchy demonstrates why the human eye is visually attracted to a certain order, path, or sequence. You need to deliberately leverage it to guide your audience toward a call-to-action.

Choose Responsive Themes

Selecting responsive themes is one of the best ways to ensure your website is responsive.

After all, the website layout, design, and efficiency depend majorly on your theme selection.

Firstly, choose a theme that is relevant to your brand or kind of the website you want to design.

Image Source: Colorlib

You might overwhelm yourself with plenty of great choices out there and might go for what seems more “dynamic”.

But focus on what kind of website you want to build. Is it a blog? Or a magazine website or maybe the agency website.

Here are a few tips on selecting the best themes for your website

Choose a compatible theme for your requirement.
Go for mobile-responsive themes
Avoid tacky and over-stuffed themes.
Opt for themes with maximum customization options
Fast and flexible themes are the best.
Go for something minimalistic or at least simple
Select the themes with standard layout and design
Choose SEO-optimized themes
Select themes that are easy to navigate through.

Use a Descriptive Keyword-focussed Headline On The Homepage

You can utilize the headline at the top of the homepage of your official website. This needs to be descriptive where it must address the purpose of your website or business.

It must answer the visitors’ first question about whether they landed in the right place or not.

Image Source: CXL

This also allows you to insert your target keyword to make your copy SEO-friendly. It also makes your website more relevant to the audience.

Marketers often put something vague, intriguing, clever, or engaging. It should be clear and precise as well.

Avoid writing anything fancy but clever, descriptive, and engaging as well.

A highly responsive website engages the visitors and encourages them to take action and keep connected with the website.

Also, it should be easy for users to share your content and publicize if they like. You need to make it your business to make things easy for visitors to take action.

Image Source: Flywheel

Every blog post on your website should have social share buttons that directly lead them to share your content on their social media platforms within a click.

Social sharing buttons help to increase brand awareness for your website. You don’t just want readers to impressed with the content and then forget it about it.

Image Source: Checkfront

It helps you retain more readers for a long time and increases the chances of conversions.

Make sure you also place social media profiles at the homepage of your website, so visitors can find you on multiple platforms as well.

Distributing the Call-to-Action Equally On Your Website

Even if you are getting lots of visitors to your website, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to convert or take action. It requires more than that!

You need to put a call-to-action throughout your landing page or website, not just at the top of it.

Image Source: Adespresso

According to the analysis by Chartbeat done on 25 million visits, they came to know that maximum engagement happens towards the bottom.

You might put the best content at the top of your landing page or sales page but most engagement doesn’t really happen there.

So, it is necessary to distribute the placement of multiple call-to-action on your website or landing page.

This is because the prospects’ interest can be high at any point on your landing page. That means there must be a call to action to capitalize on that.

Go For A Long And Detailed Landing Page

Don’t hesitate to make your product page or the sales funnel landing page very long and extensively detailed.

More space is just going to help the prospects to convince about your product if you make good use of it.

Use this space to address any possible doubt, question, or objection a potential customer might think of, especially something conflicting with making the purchase.

Image Source: Unbounce

You need to make your sales pages with a never-ending answering page until they get satisfied and stop reading.

Nothing is too long unless you provide helpful content and copy to sell your product or service.

Build a tall page answering all the questions and queries of the customers, making them more inclined to make the purchase.

Focus On Mobile-First Approach Web-design

More than half of the total website traffic in the world comes from mobile users.

It is evident to focus on a mobile-first approach when you are designing your website to be highly responsive and effective.

Image Source: Divante

Since many visitors will be browsing your website through mobile phones, you need to make it easy for them to navigate through.

The Mobile-first approach is about giving preference to the mobile version of your website.

You start by designing what your website will look like on mobile phones.

Image Source: Medium

The arrangement, spacing, visual appearance, and loading speed of various elements, such as images, text, logos, etc, need to be customized.

By ensuring the optimum efficiency of your website on mobiles, you can at least first assure a large number of mobile visitors to convert better.

Avoid Carousels, Sliders, And Tabs

Carousels and sliders have been quite popular elements in web design. They are known for bringing dynamism to the website.

But over the years, there is a problem has been discovered regarding sliders or carousels on web pages. Chances are high that visitors might only see the first slide.

Image Source: Designmodo

Plenty of studies back this conclusion very well. The slides, except the first one have fewer chances to be seen or spotted by the visitors.

This becomes even more problematic when you place an essential call-to-action to action on those slides. They are less likely to be clicked on, reducing the click-through rates.

Similarly, tabs, accordions, or expandable boxes are bad web-designing practices to go for your website.

Image Source: Webflow

More than 76% of visitors on the website prefer scanning, and they are used to it. So it is better to keep all of your content visible to your visitors.

Utilizing tall web pages rather than placing a lot of tabs and expandable accordions. Remember, scrolling and scanning is faster and easier than clicking.

Using The Whitespace In The Best Way Possible

One of the most demanded web designs in the industry is clean, minimalistic, and modern. That’s what most companies demand from web designers.

The best example of this is Apple’s website! According to Google’s Study in 2012, simplicity is perceived as the best form of beauty by the users.

A visually complex website isn’t really considered to be beautiful as the users stated in the study.

That’s how a single column layout and single-page websites got popular. Web designing started adapting more minimalistic choices for its visual elements.

To make your website really responsive, you need to utilize the whitespace to show only one thing at a time in a visible space.

Do not clutter your website with too many visual elements in closer proximity. Give a generous amount of whitespaces amongst different elements on the page.

‘Weird’ Is Not Necessarily Likable

With more freedom in web designing, businesses or websites started taking creative liberty in creating the overall look of their website.

Well, that’s good actually! It does give you the opportunity to create a website that visually resonates with the core idea or identity of your brand.

But, it is often or more likely to be exploited or even proudly created to be “weird” as emitting something new and attractive but that’s not the case.

Image Source: RankingBySEO

According to Google’s study in 2012, standard web designing formats are more likely to be accepted and loved rather than non-traditional ones.

However, it depends on a lot of factors. It certainly needs to be visually simple, clean, and high in readability.

You can be more different in ‘What’ you are saying than in ‘How’ you project your website.

Also, going totally out of the way might prevent people from understanding it easily. You need to relate, communicate, and connect with people to sell, not impress them with designing prowess.

Traits of a standard website :

Logo is located at the top left of the homepage
The search bar at the top
Horizontal Menu bar/ Navigation
Mandatory web pages such as Home, About, Contact Us, etc
Mobile-responsive web-design
Social icons

Decluttering Your Website To Make It Load Faster

One of the most powerful hacks to improve the responsiveness of your website is to declutter so it can improve the website’s load time.

Faster load time helps reduce the bounce rate, boosting your website’s engagement. The loading speed of your website also affects the ranking as well.

The frustration of a website loading for its homepage is hard to bear, so you need to ensure users don’t go through this.

An ideal speed for your website to load is within three seconds otherwise, there is a strong chance users leaving your website before it loads.

Web Design Tips & Hacks To Declutter Your Website

There are few ways how you can declutter your website through web designing hacks and tips to speed up your website and lower your bounce rate.

Optimizing images on your website

Start by focusing on using appropriate file formats for the images you use on your website.

Selecting a certain type of image file format will help you decrease the size of your image file, further reducing the loading speed of the webpage.

Use GIF for images with limited colors such as logos. JPEG is ideal for all kinds of images with multiple colors and details.

If you want to put high-quality transparent images, PNG is the better choice to go for to optimize the size.

Lowering Image File Size

Reducing the size of your image files further helps to reduce the loading speed of your webpage.

Smaller images take less bandwidth as compared to larger images. It also impacts how an image appears on your website.

Reducing HTTP request

To reduce the loading time of any website and make it faster to work for users, it is necessary to minimize the HTTP requests to your landing page.

When a user visits a web page, it sent a number of HTTP requests to download various components of the page.

You can reduce the number of these requests to make it load faster. You can use CSS sprites to do that by combining various images.

Remove unnecessary plugins

You need to get rid of all those plugins which either you don’t need or do not use. If your website has too many plugins, it also can be a reason for slow page loading.

The best is to just deactivate the plugins which you are not using actively on your website. Focus on ones that are absolutely necessary.

Selecting a better hosting provider

Hosting services affect the speed of your website significantly as not all offer the same speed.

You may go for the hosting services which are the most affordable for you but hampering the speed of your website won’t really help you save money in the long run.

Try to invest in a quality web hosting service that promises faster loading speed of web pages.

Minimalizing website coding

You can ‘minify’ your website’s coding whether it is built with JavaScript, HTML, or CSS.

It requires removing all the unnecessary elements or characters from your coding. Minifying your website coding helps you improve your website speed significantly.