First, we'd recommend you try the Google Mobile-Friendly Test to see if your site is mobile-friendly. If your site fails the test, you may lose visitors and customers. Our web design experts can help you understand the results of this test and determine how to improve your position.
If you do some research, you'll find that there are different methods to optimize your website for mobile devices. Google gives preference in search results to sites optimized primarily for mobile devices. This article will look at the advantages and disadvantages of mobile optimized website vs responsive web design, focusing on how search engine marketing changes depending on which one you implement.
Websites that automatically adjust their layout according to the percentage values that depend on the width and height and the screen size of the user's device are called responsive. A separate website design for mobile devices is not required in this case.
Responsive design is the way to go if you want all users of your site to have equal access to the information on your site, no matter what device they are using.
Advantages of responsive website design
The essential advantages of responsive website design are the following:
- Your target audience can access your website through various mobile and desktop devices. If the site design is responsive, it will adjust to the screen size of their device.
- Google gives priority to responsive sites and increases their positions in search results.
- The layout of a responsive website is similar across different devices, which helps with familiarity.
Drawbacks of responsive website design
Despite the apparent benefits of responsive website design, this approach has some disadvantages:
- If you do not start with a mobile-first approach, the content you produce may not be optimized for mobile devices in some aspects.
- Mobile page file sizes are often the same or larger than desktop pages, resulting in poorer performance.
- Mobile users have different goals and expectations than desktop users and usually demand simpler or more streamlined user interfaces designed specifically for their devices.
Mobile websites are designed separately for viewing on the small displays of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. To make a desktop site work on mobile devices with a smaller screen, you need a standalone version of the site. If you are still trying to determine whether you need a responsive web design or mobile website, consider the latter's pros and cons.
Advantages of mobile website design
The most obvious benefits of mobile sites are the following:
- The information is carefully tailored separately for mobile and desktop versions, and the navigation is perfect for mobile users.
- The site is as mobile-friendly as possible and loads quickly.
- If you already have a website, creating a mobile-friendly version will take less time than a responsive one.
Drawbacks of mobile website design
Nevertheless, a dedicated mobile site vs responsive web design has certain disadvantages, too:
- Many domains or URLs can affect SEO and make it challenging to promote your work on social media.
- When customers switch from mobile to desktop browsing and back again, the pages usually take too much time to load.
- It will be more challenging to keep track of everything as you will have to deal with two sets of everything: data, content, SEO settings and keywords, and advertising campaigns.
The choice is always better in comparison. Here is the difference between mobile site and responsive design:
- Responsive sites can be visited from any mobile device without problems, while mobile sites can run correctly only on specific mobile devices.
- Mobile websites are designed for a specific device, so the content looks different on the mobile and desktop versions of the site. Responsive design content is displayed the same on any screen size.
- Since mobile websites are made for smaller screens, they won't look good or work well on larger screens like desktop computers or laptops. Responsive websites automatically change to fit the screen size, however, with a bit less control over content scale sometimes.
- It is better to use responsive web design vs separate mobile site for SEO, because responsive ones use the same URL across all devices, which increases their SEO ranking. In contrast, mobile websites have separate mobile and desktop domains and use different URLs for their mobile and desktop versions. Keeping track of two SEO campaigns can be challenging.
- Responsive websites are more effortless to administer than mobile ones since they have only one version. The key difference between mobile website and responsive web design is that mobile requires more attention to detail, the same as the desktop version of the site.
- If you change the content or functionality of a responsive website, a web browser will reflect those changes immediately across all platforms; if you want to change the content or functionality of a mobile website, you must make those changes to the desktop version first.
- Building a responsive website is more expensive but takes less time overall.
- Responsive websites take longer to load than mobile web pages.
So you should decide whether you want to install full websites mobile-designated websites or responsively designed websites based on your needs and budgets.
