How To Make A Responsive Website For Your Business

It’s essential to make exploring your website easy for customers. Here are our top tips to make sure your website works across any device and screen size.

It doesn’t matter if you’re at home on a desktop computer, or on the go on your mobile or iPad, a website that doesn’t work well isn’t acceptable anymore. That's where website responsiveness comes in, that means making sure your website works properly across all devices, whether it’s a desktop, laptop, iPhone, Samsung, Kindle or something else.

Since nearly 8 in 10 customers are likely to stop scrolling through your website if it doesn’t display well, websites that don’t look great across all devices will lose you customers.

Sound complex? Don’t worry – we’ve got you covered. Read on for some top tips on how to go about testing your website and making sure customers leave your site happy.

How to test your website's responsiveness

You might be asking yourself; how can I find out if my website works well and looks good? Or how can I test my website on a device I don’t have?

It’s not practical to buy all the handheld devices (e.g. different makes of smartphones or tablets) that your customers might use. The good news is there are free tools out there that can put your website to the test – for example, BrowserStack, LambdaTest and WebsitePlanet. 

All you have to do is enter your website URL (your website address) and choose which device you want to test. Then the site will show you how your website looks.

What can affect a website’s responsiveness?

Some of the things that result in a website having a poor responsive rate (which most free tools will highlight) are:

• Small and/or difficult-to-read text 
• Having to zoom in to fill out a form
• A small search bar that’s difficult to click
• Photos that are out of position, the wrong proportion or pixelated (low quality images)
• You can’t scroll through the page, or it doesn’t scroll smoothly
• Links or pop-ups not working
• Too many high-resolution pictures, which makes your page load slowly  

Is it worth using pre-designed themes and layouts?

If you aren’t a designer by nature, you might need help making your site look good – so you may be interested to know that help is available, for free! 

Websites like WordPress or Wix let you use a theme or a pre-designed layout to make things easier  – some of the most responsive WordPress themes are Divi, SeedProd and Astra. All you'll have to do is update the colours, branding, and information to your liking. We suggest matching them to your business’s colour scheme (if you have one).

Testing your website’s responsiveness is an important step that helps make sure your site is up and running in the best way possible. It might seem complicated, but if you want to give your customers a great experience that your competition will envy, don’t skip it.

You may have already spoken to one of our V-Hub Digital Advisers, but if not and you're looking for more support you can get in touch here. Our Knowledge Centre is also packed with information and tips to help you on your digital journey.