Is Responsive Web Design Enough?

Contributor Kris Jones explains why having a responsive web design is a great first step but combining AMP with a PWA design is better.

As mobile-first indexing nears, the need to optimize for mobile has never felt so pressing.

Even in its current iteration, mobile search is incredibly important for advertisers and businesses of all sizes. Consider these statistics:

A majority of Google searches occur on a smartphone or tablet.

50 percent of local mobile searches are for local business contact information, says Hubspot:

According to brightedge, 69 percent of mobile searchers stated they were more likely to buy from a brand with a mobile site that addressed their concerns.

Now, with mobile web design, speed takes precedence over almost any other ranking factor. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if half of the web is seriously optimized for mobile search.

According to Think with Google, 70 percent of mobile web pages take 7 seconds to load visual content above and below the fold.

Common mobile site errors include:

Blocked javascript and cascading style sheets (CSS) files.

Failed redirects.

Poor graphical interfaces (e.g., tiny text and poor image pixelation).

Clunky search functions.

Obtrusive interstitials.

Fixing many of these issues requires investing in a responsive content management system (CMS) and the right configuration for your mobile site.

Yet many questions remain as to what configuration truly works best for your web design. Responsive web design has dominated the industry as the preferred configuration, but as the mobile web becomes more competitive, should the industry move on?

Is responsive web design enough?

Via GIPHY

Now, creating a standalone mobile web design is good from the end-user perspective, but it severely diminishes your web design’s equity from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective.

Beyond this, mobile domains can be a costly investment and even more costly to maintain.

My digital marketing firm uses responsive web design (RWD), as well as accelerated mobile pages (AMP) to create a truly mobile-friendly web design for our clients. But we must remember that responsive web design was not designed for speed, it was designed for designers.

Chances are your Web design has a responsive web design plug-in.

RWD web pages take advantage of fluid grids to render images and on-page elements in proportion to their device. For technical teams, this presents clear advantages to mobile design, including:

Responsive handling of on-page web design for different devices.

Retaining all content on a single uniform resource locator (URL), as opposed to an m. Domain.

More cost-effective than creating a standalone mobile site.

Sites can be accessed offline using hypertext markup language 5 (HTML5).

While RWD does have its advantages, it was mostly created as a low-cost way to optimize web designs for mobile search devices. It was also a way to complete this with little effort as possible.

Problems with RWD web designs still persist:

Slow loading speeds: above 10 seconds without proper onsite optimization

Designers still need to optimize for touch, as opposed to scroll-and-click interfaces

Data visualizations need to be optimized for small screens (i.e., charts and graphs)

So, why is this important? While RWD is an effective solution for small businesses and publishers on a budget, many established businesses are already making the switch to higher-speed configurations, such as accelerated mobile pages and progressive web applications (PWA).

Is AMP the answer or a red herring?

AMP represents Google’s big push to speed up the web design, but is it only on its terms?

As a quick primer, AMP is essentially an HTML framework that works the same as a content delivery network, serving stripped-down versions of web pages to increase page speeds. AMP is ideal for publishers who serve news articles and blog posts. It’s very similar to Facebook’s Instant Articles format.

AMP is currently being employed by multiple search engines, and even adwords ads. Using the “Fast Fetch” tag, AMP continues to become faster and easier to implement.

According to Google, over 900,000 domains have already adopted AMP, and that number continues to grow.