Have you heard the proverb ‘a bad worker always blames his tools’? No? But if you’ve been at a website development agency recently and heard someone on the design team say that responsive website design is bad, then you’ve heard it, just in a different form. The truth is, responsive web design is good, in fact, we think it’s an amazing technique for creating truly stunning device-agnostic websites that will look just as good on small screens (smartphones and mobile) as they do on desktop computers. The problem is that some web developers will advertise responsive website design as their strengths and ultimately fail to deliver an acceptable final product. And when they can’t find any good excuse to defend their incompetence, they will blame this.

What is the standard excuse and how is he forced to become the villain?

Responsive website design doesn’t tolerate idiots. It depends on the expert execution of techniques and tools like CSS preprocessors, frameworks, user detection agents. When that doesn’t happen, it generates unnecessary residual files and junk that increases the file size. A bloated web page will load sluggishly, and the blame usually lies with responsive website design as a technique. The real flaw is in the implementation. Owning a powerful weapon does not make anyone a good shot. It’s not the culprit here, it’s the bad implementation.

How do you get a good responsive website design without the idiocy?

When choosing a website development company, ask questions that will help you make informed decisions. Don’t ask ‘can you make a responsive website?’, ask ‘what is the average load time of your responsive designs?’. An experiment conducted by Forbes in 2016 shows that 1-second pages have higher conversion rates compared to 5-second pages. The ideal page size should be less than 2MB at all costs.

Getting a page to load in 1 second in the Indian context is demanding too much on the infrastructure, but a 2 second page should be your goal. Anything more than that is usually slow. 3 seconds should be your limit! No more than that. Compare all your design agencies with the ‘page load in 2 seconds’ standard. And ask for it, there is no commitment in that. A perfect responsive website design that loads in 2-3 seconds is possible, settling for less is ok – mediocre. (Note: Do not test load times on slow Internet speeds! Test it on a high-speed broadband Internet connection. The load times we mention are only on high-speed broadband connections.)

Responsive website design is a must because most of your visitors/buyers will be on smartphones. If the fonts and images on your website look microscopic when viewed on a mobile screen, you’re practically asking your mobile phone visitors to go away. So you need a good responsive design, but if it loads slowly, you are again sending your visitors to your competitor’s website that looks good on a small screen and loads in a jiffy. Or you can play the other way around and attract more visitors with a well-designed, fast-loading website – the choice is yours.