So, what is a responsive website? What does it look and feel like?

According to Wikipedia, responsive web design is an approach that ensures all the pages of the website look, work and feel perfectly on any device. Whether it is a tiny old cell phone with a screen width of 320px, a modern phablet with 7 inches screen, a big iPad, or a TV with a massive diagonal line, all the main aspects such as content, design, and especially functionality should perform consistently to provide users with an excellent user experience.

In technical terms, responsive web design implies a set of instructions that help web pages change their layout and appearance to meet different screen widths and resolutions.

The concept of a responsive website appeared due to non-effective and ill-suited ways of handling screen sizes. Originally, pages were built to target a particular device. This approach implied creating a range of designs for each responsive tier resulting in different versions of the same page. However, with the mobile web becoming a reality and more and more devices with non-standard resolutions appeared, this approach has quickly become irrelevant since it could not handle this variety efficiently.

In the early 2010s, largely thanks to a gifted Ethan Marcotte, developers started to switch from popular adaptive design (an approach that implied creating several versions of one design) to responsive design (an approach that suggested only one yet flexible version of a website that stretched or shrunk to fit the screen). Although that technique was pretty new and untested, nevertheless, its benefits were hard to ignore. Even now, those advantages prove to everyone that a responsive website is the only way out. Let us consider them.

Benefits of Responsive Web Design

The main benefits of using a responsive website are

• consistent visual experience;
• better user experience;
• no need for redirects;
• lower bounce rates;
• lower maintenance needs;
• high web page loading speed;
• no extra fees for creating and maintaining different versions;
• easy analytics reporting.

Even though responsive design is not flawless, it has its cons, for example,

• It is not fully optimized;
• It can slow performance;
• It may suffer from web browser incompatibility;
• It makes it challenging to run advertising campaigns;
• It makes it challenging to offer different things to different users depending on the device used;

Nevertheless, it had and has significant advantages over other solutions. Therefore, nowadays, responsive web design is a standard for websites.