Evolutions in web technologies have become a routine. The vast usage of website has made responsive web design the need of hour. When web design was in the nascent stage, separate urls for desktop and mobile access were created. It used to be a long process and time-consuming as well. Thereby, two separate protocols were discovered to respond the request through different devices.
Subsequently, the idea of responsiveness was coined. Later, it became a bottom line from Google for rendering excellent user experience. It cut on time since just one url is formed for multiple devices’ access. Its influence began reflecting the ranking of the website. Online traffic from desktop and mobile jams up the useful sites. As a repercussion, the Google juice via SEO activities goes to the account of those responsive web designs. The analytics show an ideal blend of inflowing traffic from various devices. It implies that the traffic from multiple sources would be combined to configure good ranking in SERPs. Otherwise, separate analytical figures of the same site are collected that manufacture low rank due to diversion of traffic. Since urls remain unaffected when the same website is accessed through social media, the searches scale up. It requires modification in only Cascading Style Sheet in case any hassle shoots. Thereby, the functionality and other components of the site remain agile and untouched. The agent users that determine the mobile device and browser’s introduction is not required.
Like advantages, there are some disadvantages of this evolutionary web design. As it is all about editing CSS and HTML codes, the pro and skilled expert is required to do so. Otherwise, the pan design can turn a disastrous. For online ads, it’s not the platform for bestowing good user experience. The slot for ad display is fixed, i.e. above the fold. But when it is browsed through mobile phone, the ads get pushed down. Thereby, the client’s ad may be skipped from the potential customers. So, it’s a clear loss for him.
Advantages
- Resizable website as per any device
A responsive design is what makes the website fit to the screen sizes of disparate devices, like laptop, desktop, mobile phone and other ones. In short, you get an amazing feature of automatically adjusting all visuals of the website so that it needs no extra effort on defining designing codes for different device. To signal the browser that your webpage is adapted to all devices, this responsive design offers this code to ensure: meta name- “viewport” content= “width=device-width, initial scale-1.0”
- Single URL for convenient SEO activities
This web design is a setup where the server always sends the similar HTML code to all devices and uses CSS (a web design language) to edit the rendering of the page on different devices. It helps Google algorithms to identify the setup through Googlebot agents’ crawling into the website. Thereby, the visibility through all devices is counted, scrolling up its ranking in the search engine.
- Google juice will rank up the site
This design enables Google algorithms to accurately assign indexing properties to the page, which in other cases requires the signal of corresponding desktop or mobile pages. Being laced with SEO favouring characteristics, it ensures indexing to make a webpage recognizable by search engines. Besides, users can share and link your web content with a single URL.
- Less engineering time
This web layout needs less time to administer the challenges interrupting multiple pages for the same content. Firstly, it reduces possibilities to have mistakes, affecting mobile experience. The designer needs no redirection for users to catch up with a device-optimised view, which reduced loading time. As the page is crawled by the Googlebots, you save on resources also.
- No possibility of common mistakes
There are some common designing mistakes like blocked JavaScript/CSS/Image files, unplayable content, faulty redirects, irrelevant cross links, slow mobile speed and mobile only 404s etc.. This kind of design gets you connected to webmaster, which helps you to identify the type of error. Thereafter, making adjustments for correction won’t take much of time.
- No redirection for device optimized view
You don’t need to execute redirection hacks to make your website device-optimised. This feature helps take less of time in loading. On the flip side, the user agent-based redirection is prone to errors. It can degrade your customers’ experience.
- Just a Googlebot user agent crawls
Being a responsive layout, you can save resources as a single Googlebot crawls into your site just once. This means that you don’t need multiple times crawling with different Googlebot agents for retrieving all versions of the content. This can boost up your site’s crawling efficiency, indirectly pushes Google to index more of the web content and keep it fresh.
Disadvantages
- Navigation is tough to use
Since you see a completely new view of the web template on mobile phones, it becomes tough to identify navigation. The screen of the handset is too small to view them, as you can see on a large desktop view. So, it’s not easy to spot and use navigation in different views.
- Long time to download
It may take more than enough time to download or load the web content in this design. The browser may spend more than required minutes in detecting user-agents due to mismatched strings while exploring on different devices and cloaking.
- Cause bad user experience
As aforesaid, this web design takes more than enough time to manifest on-screen data. The impulsive user doesn’t get stuck to seeing on-going loading. He irks and bounces out of the website, which is termed as a bad user experience. This happening can cost you loss of around 25% users on an average.
- Need more time to develop
Designing a website with HTML is easy. It does not need a lot of tantrums. When it comes to the responsive layout, it is way more difficult. The designer must have a strong hold on JavaScript, CSS and HTML, which is a little bit harder to find.
- Outdated browser does not support media
If you are working with an old browser, this template does not meet the media requirements. This layout operates as per the media queries that generally provide information about the screen size likely to be view on. There are many old browsers that do not support such enclosed media queries.
- Combined detection of server and device
The server generally works in tandem with JavaScript on the client side, which ensures device’s capabilities to alter the content being served. Typically, it gets stored in a cookie that the server reads on subsequent browsing from the same device. If the designer does not describe in full in the dynamic serving section, the user fails to visit the site.
- Redirection takes time to visit
The mobile and desktop view uses different URLs, which Google does not favour because all are accessible for Googlebot user agents. But sometimes, you need to revamp a static web layout into responsive, you need to signal the relationship between two URLs by <link> tag with rel=”canonical” and rel=”alternate” elements. It needs redirection correctly.