Why Responsive Themes Are a Total Must-Have
Responsive themes, responsive design, responsive websites. The word “responsive” has been all the rage lately, but what does it actually mean? Why does your website need to be responsive? How do you know whether it is responsive?
Let’s answer all of these questions one by one and make sure you get the best of your online presence.
What Is a Responsive Theme?
Responsive themes are designed with the goal to enable optimal user experience across different devices and screen resolutions – desktop computers, tablets, and various mobile devices. This means that no matter which way you access a certain website, it will be easy to navigate and use.
Responsive websites rearrange elements in response to the viewpoint size. For example, a four-column gallery may turn into a single column gallery on the mobile phone screen.
How does this happen? Responsive design relies on breakpoints, usually based on the width of the browser, to define which design will appear above or below them. This is achieved through the smart use of CSS which determines the layout of the webpage and adjusts the appearance accordingly.
What Isn’t a Responsive Site?
It is important to make a distinction between responsive websites and mobile websites. While both work with the phone screen for optimal user experience, they are not the same. Mobile websites are built specifically for phones and won’t display properly on other devices. Before responsive design became popular, many businesses created separate desktop and mobile sites.
With a responsive site or theme, this is needless – responsive sites can adjust to any existing or future device due to its “fluid” structure.
Why Do You Need a Responsive WordPress Theme?
Having a responsive website is no longer a matter of choice – nowadays it’s practically a necessity. Apart from providing visitors with better user experience, responsive sites also rank better on search engines thanks to faster loading times and smaller bounce rates.
To understand just how much traffic and sales you’re missing out with a non-responsive site, consider these numbers.
- Daily use of mobile internet has grown 504% since 2011
- More than half of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones in 2018.
- 44.7% of all e-commerce retail in the US for 2018 came from mobile purchases
- Before visiting stores and places, 82% of smartphone shoppers conduct ‘near me’ searches
- Every year, there is a 88% growth in time spent watching videos via mobile devices
So, it’s clear, whether you are building a site from scratch or using a theme, mobile-first design is an absolute must. A high-quality theme built for popular content management platforms like WordPress is the easiest way to ensure total responsiveness with great UX design and SEO-ready site structure.
When you download or purchase a WordPress theme, don’t take the creator’s word that it’s responsive. Always double-check responsiveness on your own.
We’ll show you how to do this using Gioia WordPress theme. The ideal way to truly get the feel of how a certain theme or site looks like on different screens is to simply access them from various devices. But since you certainly don’t have every device in the world, you can also do this from Chrome.
Open any page on the theme or site. Right-click anywhere on the page and select Inspect to open a new window.
Locate a Toggle device toolbar icon in the upper left corner and click on it.
This will open a small tab with options to look at the page layout on various screen resolutions.
You can pick the view from devices available in the drop-down menu, or you can click on the edit option and set custom sizes.
Screen sizes vary based on current trends, but it is recommended to pay the most attention to mobile devices.
Conclusion
When it comes to responsiveness, don’t rush things and patiently check the themes you shortlisted. Not only do you want to make sure that both technical and user experience details remain intact, but you also want to maintain the same impression and brand identity across various devices.
To save time and skip sifting through dozens of themes, here’s some help – we compiled this list of WordPress themes for businesses that pack both responsive design and amazing functionalities.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
