Why your E-commerce website needs to be responsive

April 09, 2021

With internet users increasing with each day through various devices such as smart phones, laptops, tablets and so on, it has now become crucial for businesses to optimize the design and layout of websites for all kinds of devices, or in other words, to make their websites “responsive”.

This applies to any website but more to business websites, and more specifically, to e-commerce websites or the websites which allow people to purchase products online.

A responsive ecommerce platform is a means to display a business/shopping website’s content on screens of any size and shape clearly and make it visible and look pretty on any device screen - thus delivering exceptional browsing and shopping experience to online users.

Here are some reasons for businesses to have e-commerce websites which are fully responsive to all screen sizes and shapes:

Good User Experience

A normal non-responsive website appears very small on smartphones and tablets and as a result, users have to scroll too much and navigation becomes irritating for them. So, in order to improve this poor browsing experience responsive web design needs to be implemented.

With responsive web design unnecessary scrolling is eliminated and the navigation is also smooth for users. This helps businesses deliver a good user experience to customers who purchase from them through mobile.

Easy To Maintain

Going for responsive web designing, as opposed to keeping separate mobile version of your business site can reduce work needed on the website to a significant extent. In case of a responsive e-commerce site, if you update content on any product page, then you just have to update in one of the versions, and the changes will be reflected on others as well. Moreover, it is easier to maintain one website or version rather than multiple versions for each device or size for the same site.

Maximising Content Usage

Businesses often need to update the content on their official sites. Having different versions of the same site will make this a hassle, as businesses will then need to upload the same content updates separately to each of the versions. But with a responsive design, the same content can be easily reflected if applied in any one place.

Also, sharing same through a common URL becomes possible, making it easier for users to open and view it. This also gives a sense of credibility for your site to your users/potential customers.

Better Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Responsive design also makes websites SEO-friendly, as responsive websites use just a single URL for both desktop or mobile, and users are directed to a single location irrespective of the device on which they are browsing. This helps in improving the ranking of the site on search engine results. Moreover, as all the SEO efforts will be focused on just the one existing website, the benefits will be significantly higher. 

It was reported that Google, which is the most popular search engine today, and which is used by a large percentage of internet users, also prefers responsive websites over separate versions, as separate versions will have different URLs and HTMLs, which makes it difficult for Google to index and rank the main site and its other versions in searches. Responsive websites om the other hand will have the same URL and HTML for all versions, and this makes the ranking much easier.

Cost-Effective

The initial cost of responsive e-commerce website development may be a bit more than that of a non-responsive site, but in the long run, a non-responsive site will pull more costs, for developing and, maintaining different versions for the same. But for a non-responsive site, businesses don’t have to pay multiple times for building the same site again.

And for business that own e-commerce sites, these will need to be updated more frequently than others. In this case, having two (or more) different sites will be necessary to keep up with competitions and demands, and it will be tedious and expensive as well.

Hence, having a responsive e-commerce website for your business helps bring down maintenance costs and is significantly more beneficial as compared to having a non-responsive e-commerce store.