14 DAY TRIAL // Going mobile is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity for most websites. People spend more and more time on their phones and even at home prefer to use their tablets rather than their laptops. To accommodate this, many websites turn to responsive design, i.e. the idea of having one website that works for all screen sizes.
This is done via a clever layout, minimalist design, heavy use of CSS, i.e. media queries and the likes, and JavaScript when all else fails.
The advantage to this approach is that you only have one site that you need to maintain, rather than having to maintain a separate mobile site.
But it may not be such a great idea after all. One report by The Search Agency shows a rather worrying statistic, responsive design sites are much slower to load than mobile sites and even standard desktop sites.
Given that people really don't like to wait, especially on their phones, that's not good. In fact, anything more than a couple of seconds is considered too long for a mobile site. Google even downranks sites that are slow to load.
Granted, in the study, just one percent of the sites used responsive design, the vast majority of the rest were dedicated mobile sites.
And it's quite possible and very likely true that with some optimizations, the responsive design sites could be made much, much faster. But, in the end, a dedicated mobile site is still going to be faster, so, if you can afford it, spring for it.
In fact, that seems to be the thinking for most of the retailers that the study looked at, 91 percent had a dedicated mobile site while eight percent relied on their desktop sites on mobile devices. So the fact that too few sites used responsive design may simply be a self-fulfilling prophecy explaining why they're so slow.