In the world of website design, a responsive theme is one of your small business website’s must-haves. Half of your website’s visitors will be on a mobile device, while the other half will be on full-screen, desktop-type devices. In order to properly cater to both types of visuals, your website will need a responsive design or responsive theme. Let’s take a look at what a responsive design is, why it’s necessary, and how to select the right responsive theme for your small business website.
What Is a Responsive Design?
In minimally-technical terms, a responsive design simply contains a bit of specialized code that allows the entire website to be resized to fit any screen ratio and pixel count. For example, while a Surface Book 3 contains 3000×2000 pixels, an iPhone 13 has 1170×2532 pixels. For website designs with static width and height ratios, converting a landscape (wider than tall) website to portrait (taller than wide) can be a real issue.
A responsive design does more than just scale down the size of images and font – this would give a zoomed-out effect on taller devices. On the other hand, a good responsive theme will rearrange content (and sometimes even hide content) so that the images and font all stay easily visible and legible.
Why Does My Website Design Need to Be Responsive?
As mentioned above, there is a wide variety of devices that will be used to view your website. If you do not have a responsive theme in play on your website, you are essentially alienating part of your potential clientele. If the design isn’t so bad that visitors can’t read or see your content, you’re at least making it more difficult for them to use your site than it needs to be. Furthermore, your website’s searchability may be impacted based on your theme choice:
Search Engines Prefer Responsive Websites
In layman’s terms, search engines like Google will place your website higher in the search results if you have a website that works well on mobile devices. Google uses two separate crawl bots: one for desktop and one for mobile viewing. If your site performs poorly on the mobile crawl, you’ll be ranked lower.
Your Site Might Get Blacklisted if it Is Not Responsive
Google is constantly changing how its search engine ranks websites, and a website can recover from being blacklisted; however, it’s important to realize just how critical having a responsive theme can be. In 2019, Google was blacklisting sites that did not work well on mobile devices with their mobile-first initiative. This is a worst-case scenario, however, as most themes (even free ones) have mobile-ready components.
It’s Just More User-Friendly
At the end of the day, your job as a small business is to cater to your customers. For this reason, optimizing every part of your business to fit your clients’ needs is paramount; having a responsive website design is just a part of this strategy.
How Do I Select a Responsive Theme for My Small Business Website?
Most WordPress themes are responsive nowadays, but that doesn’t mean that the degree to which these themes are optimized isn’t different. Some themes will flow better and work better with your small business website’s content, so you may have to do some fiddling and trials to find the best overall theme for you. Here at Snellville Websites, we use Divi, the industry standard, due to its high responsiveness and ease of use on mobile devices.
Can Snellville Websites Help My Small Business?
Absolutely.
Here at Snellville Websites, we develop websites for local Atlanta and Snellville small businesses on a regular basis. Our themes are 100% responsive for devices of any size; you don’t have to worry about selecting a theme or changing anything on the backend of your website design. Ready to get the process started on your new small business website? Contact the team of website design and content creation experts here at Snellville Websites.
