A Responsive Website is highly essential in today’s business due to the surge of people using their phones to search and buy products online.

It’s a great way to leverage the online presence of your business and make your site available to various devices. It’s important to have a responsive website to offer a smooth user experience to all users across multiple devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, and desktop computers.

You may also look for inspirations on the mobile version of your competitor’s website. This will help you decide the look you want for your website and finish it before doing the desktop version.

Once the mobile version of your website is working well on a mobile device, it will work better on all other devices. This is only a crumb when it comes to the tips for a responsive website.

But, what exactly is a responsive web design and why it’s important?

Responsive Website in a Nutshell

Before proceeding to the tips of having a responsive site, it’s best to know first what a responsive website is and its aim. A responsive website automatically recognizes the user’s device and adjusts the layout instantly.

It instantly conforms to the user’s device specifications, giving an enhanced user experience. It aims to provide an impeccable user experience irrespective of the device used.

Responsive web design (RDW) also intends to:

  • minimize zooming
  • reduce panning
  • lessen the scrolling time each time the users access the website through a mobile phone or a tablet.
  • reduce confusion
  • smooth navigation
  • enhanced user-experience

Having a responsive website will give you leverage against your competitors whose websites aren’t responsive. So, how can you have a responsive website? Kindly refer to the guide below.

Responsive Website Tips

So, we’ve already talked about designing the mobile version of your website first. Nonetheless, there’s a lot more to that, so don’t go away!

Before designing a responsive website, you’ve got to go through several processes to create one successfully. So, here are the 12 Tips for a Responsive Website this 2021.

Tip #1: Design the Mobile Version of Your Website First to Have a Responsive Website

Since the use of smartphones is increasing, it’s wise not to stay late on the trend and make your website mobile-friendly. This will ensure that your business website will be more accessible to a wide range of mobile users. 

You can start this by drafting your mobile website on paper before designing the desktop website. Look for possible inspirations for your mobile website version at your competitor’s sites and refine it to your likings. 

Make sure to finish the mobile version first before starting to draw the desktop version of your website.

Tip #2: Plan Your Design Ahead

One of the mistakes web designers make is that they start building right away without a plan. Although you might feel that you’re off for a better and quick start, there’s a high chance that you’ll end up with a weak design.

Thus, planning ahead is needed to ensure a favourable result. Consider doing some research before doing the first line of code. Do the following before anything else for smoother execution of your responsive website:

  • Check out your competitor’s website
  • Choose a set of colours you want to use 
  • Determine the tone of voice you want for your brand
  • Determine your main call-to-action (CTA) 

After this, plan for your navigation. 

Tip #3: Consider Your Navigation

Another thing you should consider in having a responsive website is navigation. Your web navigation allows your visitors to visit from page to page without difficulty, providing users with a smooth experience.

Although you won’t get jabbed at using the same navigation in the footer, it’s not the same with the header navigation. Your header navigation for mobile and desktop must be different from one another. 

Since the header space on a mobile device is limited, you may use the hamburger menu for your site navigation. However, some visitors might not notice the hamburger menu. 

Thus, it’s best to add the essential navigation items to your pages. This way, you can ensure your visitors can find the pages they want to see without hassles. 

Tip #4: Learn More About Media Queries

Media queries enable you to showcase the precise styling to your web visitors based on the device they use. Upon using media queries to your CSS, the content will respond based on the particular specifications of various devices. 

Some samples of media queries are the following:

@media screen and (min-width: 480px) {

  body {

    background-color: lightpink;

@media screen and (min-width: 480px) {

  body {

    background-color: peach;

To try these out, you may create your own media queries based on your preferences. After this, you may now work with the structure of your website.

Tip #5: Plan Your Design

It could be tempting to start building your website right after having your own domain. However, it would be best to outline your website structure first before developing it. 

That way, you’ll have a clear direction of what your website would look like, which helps you save time and build a site with a good structure. With a piece of paper and a pen, map out where you’ll put your headline, call-to-action, and other vital elements.

Tip #6: Choose a Template You Like and Customize it

Using a template is a better choice than starting from scratch, though you can also create your own. The advantage of this is that you’re going to save a lot of time with this.

There are many beautiful templates on WordPress or Wix, and all that’s left to do is customize it to have some personal touch.

Tip #7: Keep a Minimalistic Design to Attain Responsive Website

To keep your web design responsive to smaller screens, make sure to use minimalistic design as much as possible. This is because the viewing extent of mobile is limited compared to desktop, where you have a lot of space for other details.

You may use media queries to delete the unnecessary items of your design to keep it more fluid. 

Tip #8: Compress Your Images

Creating a beautiful, responsive website is a process. Thus, it can take time to have one. Once you already have the website that you want, the work doesn’t end there.

You have to ensure that you’re compressing the images you’re using. This means you have to use the smallest file size of images to have a better loading speed, especially for mobile users.

Using a large file size will take 10 seconds or more to load the site, which is inconvenient for any user. Your web visitors might abandon your page if it loads slow.

The use of compressed images ensures that your page won’t load too slow.

Tip #9: Optimize Your Mobile Buttons & Typography

In making a responsive website, it’s common to make everything smaller for mobile phones and other smaller screens. However, your buttons should be an exception. 

If you’re a business owner, it’s a must to have that ‘buy button’ appear larger to get the attention of your visitors. This way, your potential buyers will not have any problems tapping that button. 

The more noticeable your ‘buy button’ is, the better. Furthermore, it’s also crucial that your fonts are easy to read particularly, on mobile phones and tablets.

So, whenever you design a responsive website, it’s important to ensure that your font is easy to read and big enough on mobile and tablet screens.

Tip #10: Place the Share Buttons Appropriately

Another thing to consider in having a responsive website is the share buttons. These buttons are essential in helping your content reach a large audience on social sites like Facebook and Instagram. 

However, these buttons should not be blocking any images or texts on smaller screens. 

Tip #11: Avoid Using a Background Video

Some websites use a background video on their homepage. Although this can be cool to look at, the mobile and other small screen users will suffer from this in terms of load time. 

The loading speed of some devices is pretty slow. So, using a background video on your landing page will only make the load time worse. 

Thus, you must make your website simple if you want to have a responsive website. 

Tip #12: Test Your Responsive Website Design

After creating your responsive website design, the next step that you should take is to test its responsiveness. You may test your website using the Google Mobile-Friendly Test and see your result.

The Google Mobile-Friendly Test will check out if your site is mobile-friendly. It also measures the ease of access, reading, and navigating your site on mobile devices. 

It also provides suggestions on what you need to improve to make your site more mobile-friendly.

Takeaway

Since a responsive website is a must for every business owner nowadays, it’s best not to get late in the trend. Thus, as early as possible, build a responsive website to reach a wide range of audiences while offering a smooth user experience.

To do that, make sure to keep your website design minimalistic for smaller screens to avoid confusion. It’s also crucial to use compressed images to avoid adding up to the load time that discourages visitors from staying on your page.

To sum it all, make your website simple to provide an enhanced user experience to smaller screen users and to load your site a lot faster.