Responsive web design

Very few of you would nowadays choose a non-responsive / non-adaptative WordPress theme for your new website but this was not the case as recent as a couple of years ago when quite some people were still against responsive web design being kind of a default option (not sure they would say the same if we ask them now, most of the issues they mention were more due to poor technology/design than because of the concept itself) which means that it’s likely that some of your older sites are still non-responsive.

Myself, I write in a few other blogs (even a blogspot one, yes, shame on me!) including this one that only last week I switched to a responsive theme. Why did it took me so long? Pure lazyness. I liked the old theme and the site is a pure blogging site meaning that I didn’t have any fancy stuff around (e.g. sliders) that required a frequent update to avoid looking old-fashioned.

So, why did I finally make the switch? The main push came when I saw that Google was clearly flagging my website as not mobile friendly at all.

Google pagespeed mobile results for a non-responsive theme
Google pagespeed mobile results for a non-responsive theme

We could discuss at length the importance of this Google rating for SEO purposes and the like but I look at it more as a warning (which I then verified myself since I had not tried to access the site with my mobile in a long long time) that some of my readers (a 15% of them, according to Google Analytics) were having a terrible user experience when trying to follow my posts there and maybe I was losing some of them.

Since both the old and the new themes are pretty standard and, again, no fancy stuff I just needed a simple design, I was able to quickly complete the switch and just like that Google rewarded my efforts:

Google pagespeed rating with a responsive theme
Google pagespeed rating with the new responsive theme

Will my site go up in the search rankings after this? Will I get more visitors? Not sure, maybe not, but at least I made some of my existing readers happy and that’s more than enough to justify the change. I hope you agree and consider following suit!

Featured image by Wikimedia Commons

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