By the end of 2022, nearly five billion people globally had a smartphone. According to 2023 data, 58.43% of the world’s total website traffic comes from mobile devices, with almost 80% of users making at least one online purchase through their phone within the last six months.

Mobile devices have evolved into a fixture of everyday life, reshaping how we communicate, and get informed and entertained. Mobile-friendly web design unsurprisingly became the talk of the town in the last years, as having a site unfit for mobiles meant losing approximately half of the traffic and a significant portion of the site’s profits.

Yet, there’s still the other half of the internet traffic not to be neglected. While the emphasis has, for years, been on optimizing websites for mobile phones, we, in fact, live in a multi-device world.

On an average day, we use a variety of devices to complete our work tasks, get in touch with people, and entertain.

From using large desktop screens in offices to evening freelancing on laptops, scrolling social media on mobile phones, reading books on Kindle, watching movies on smart TVs to researching travel deals on a tablet, we switch between devices seamlessly—and we expect websites to do the same.

This is where responsive web design enters the scene.

In this article, we will discuss responsive web design as the dominant approach to creating websites that are accessible, functional, and beautiful across device sizes and resolutions.

What Is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design is a web design approach in which site content is able to adapt to different screen and window sizes on a range of devices.

In other words, responsive design enables delivering multiple, separate layouts of a single website to accommodate different devices like desktops, phones, “phablets,” tablets, game consoles, TVs, and wearables.

Responsive design also helps reduce the need for creating and managing additional separate websites or mobile sites specifically for different devices and window sizes. Instead, a single website is created that can be used on all devices.

This single site can use standard HTML and CSS, or a more robust, scalable web development framework. Not only does this save time and money, but it can also reduce maintenance costs.

Responsive vs. Adaptive vs. Mobile-First Web Design

Responsive web design is frequently weighed up against two identically prevalent design approaches—adaptive and mobile-first website design.

Adaptive design involves creating multiple, entirely different versions of the same website. These design templates are generated and optimized for every device class uniquely.

Unlike responsive design which adapts how a single version is rendered, the adaptive approach entails building a website script that checks for the screen size and then accesses the template designed specifically for that device.

When it comes to mobile-first web design, it entails designing the mobile site version first and working up to the desktop version. This approach works well for a number of reasons, such as greater efficiency in solving common usability concerns and easier scaling up to the mobile version compared to scaling down the desktop version.

While both mobile-first and adaptive approaches are efficient web design strategies, their relevancy is slowly fading. The reason is that there are simply too many screen sizes and different variables to take into account when designing a website.

Screen sizes are incessantly changing, and innovative device designs are envisioned and built at a fast pace. Unlike mobile-first and adaptive approaches, responsive design ensures building a website that is forward-compatible to any screen size, today and in the future.

Key Elements of Responsive Web Design

The essence of responsive web design is that the device should determine the content flow, not the other way around. Responsiveness is about building with flexibility and fluidity in mind from the very beginning, rather than having to tweak a newly completed website to match every technological update.

Responsive web design entails a myriad of well-known techniques and strategies but also takes some custom approaches depending on the unique needs of each web project.

In the following paragraphs, we’ll take a look at some of the principal methods to achieve responsiveness when designing a website.

Relative Length Units

Length is the fundamental element of responsive web design. Instead of using absolute units, like pixels, the responsive approach uses viewport-relative units like vh or vw or font-relative units like em or rem.

These allow the site’s design to respond to changing screen sizes and preserve the site’s functionality regardless of element layout.

Flexible Grid Layout

A flexible grid layout is a design technique that uses a grid system to organize and arrange the various elements on a web page. The grid is composed of a series of columns and rows, which can be resized and adjusted to fit the screen size of different devices.

This means that the same web page can be viewed on different devices, such as desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, and still look good and be easy to use.

Adapted Navigation

Navigation looks and feels different across devices, and the responsive web design aims to make those switches as seamless as possible.

On a laptop, navigation along the top or side of the screen is easy to use, but on a smaller device, such as a mobile phone which is usually held in one hand, a one-handed navigation functionality feels more natural.

Besides altering the position and the layout, smaller screens often force web creators to condense navigation into a hamburger menu. A hamburger menu is a type of navigation icon that is commonly used on mobile devices and responsive websites to hide and reveal a site’s navigation menu. It is typically represented by three horizontal lines that resemble the shape of a hamburger, hence the name.

Responsive Images

Images should be responsive, meaning they should be able to scale up or down to fit the screen size of the device being used to view the website. When designing for responsiveness, consider whether images are informative or decorative and how their role will affect the way they will be scaled.

There are several techniques that designers can use to create responsive images. One approach is to use the HTML “srcset” attribute, which allows designers to specify different versions of an image for different screen sizes. Another approach is to use CSS media queries to adjust the size of an image based on the screen size of the device.

It’s worth noting that while responsive images can help to improve the user experience on mobile devices, they can also impact the performance of the website. Large, high-resolution images can be slow to load on mobile networks, which can lead to a poor user experience.

Scaled Text

The text should be in em or rem units and large enough to be easily read regardless of screen size. Moreover, it shouldn’t get cut off or overflow the viewport.

On smaller screens especially, it is vital to maintain a good aesthetic balance between different text elements, such as headlines, body paragraphs, and buttons, using relative units to scale the text responsively.

To Sum Up

As technical innovations continue to develop, the digital realm will have to adopt all responsive design practices to meet web standards and user expectations. At the end of the day, responsive design is all about giving users the best online experience and creating a website that looks great and works well on any device.

If you want to build a website that is responsive, functional, and intuitive across devices, reach out to some of the best providers of web design services in Chicago, whose years-long experience and deep understanding of responsive standards and strategies will get you an efficient, long-lasting web presence.