When customers need help with air conditioning repairs or maintenance, the first place they go is the Internet. The days of going page by page in the phone book are over. They’re looking at your website and Yelp reviews.

They’re not even looking at your website on their laptop. They’re eating at a restaurant or taking a break from work and checking it on their cell phones. Does your website look good on mobile devices?

It’s important to follow responsive design best practices for your website. These make it easier for people using mobile phones to see and navigate your site.

Responsive Web Design vs. Mobile Adaptive

Google has made your mobile site important for search ranking, but it’s also important for user experience. There are two main types of mobile sites: responsive and mobile adaptive.

Mobile adaptive sites shrink to fit the screen of a specific size. This would be fine if everyone’s cell phones and tablets were the same sizes. This can make some sites look bad if the screen is larger or smaller than the pre-created adaptive pages.

Responsive design doesn’t care what size your screen is. It shrinks and expands based on the current screen size. It’s also the preferred design by Google for search rankings.

Google wants its customers to have the best experience. A web page that fits to their individual screen size improves the user experience.

Page Load Speed is Part of Responsive Design Best Practices

When people look at a website on their phone, they could be in the middle of a million different things. If their AC unit isn’t working, then the house is heating up, temperatures flair and they don’t want to wait for your page to load.

If your site has video, large pictures, JavaScript and CSS files, then they could slow down your page. Avoid this compressing and caching them. It may not seem like a major improvement to you, but every millisecond counts.

Consider Mobile-First Instead of Desktop

If you’re developing a new site, don’t start out with the desktop site and then work down to mobile. Google adopted mobile-first indexing that looks at your mobile site to determine ranking.

Work on the mobile site first to make sure it looks perfect on mobile phones and then make considerations for desktop. Instead of thinking about responsive design as desktop shrinking to mobile size, consider it as mobile expanding to desktop size.

It’s Not Just the Phones, But Browsers Too

Business owners have to consider the many types of phones available, but they also have to consider the browser. Cell phones have several types of browsers from Chrome and Firefox to Samsung and Apple browsers.

Your responsive design needs to look good for all the various browsers along with the different phone screen sizes and resolutions.

Don’t Get Caught in The Cold

Follow these responsive design best practices and you’re phone will ring off the hook with new customers. They’ll pick your company because of the information available on your responsive and easy-to-use website.

For more information about responsive design, please contact us.