Common Mistakes to Be Avoided From Responsive Web Design

Responsive Website represents a design and development that respond to the screen size, platform and orientation of the user’s device. This work is a blend of flexible grids, layouts, images and CSS media queries.

It’s not easy to make a website responsive to mobile or any other device. There are certain mistakes that designers often make, which leads to bad user experience.

So, here are some common mistakes that you can avoid making further (if you have done before) to deliver the best responsive web design services.

Blocking JS, CSS and Image Files

This mistake can interfere with optimisation of the website, interrupting rendering and indexing. So, you should always allow Googlebot to access the JavaScript, CSS and image files. It ensures Googlebot to explore your website as an ordinary user.

Corrective Measures

· Avoid disallowing all these through robot.txt file, as it may hinder rendering and indexing of your content.

· Use the URL Inspection tool in the search console to identify if the disallowing indexing is fixed or not.

· Run the mobile-friendly test to see your website’s compatibility with mobile devices.

· In case you use separate URLs for different devices, ensure that the Googlebot can redirect to crawl and index seamlessly.

Unplayable Media Content

There are some videos that require Flash to play on your mobile phone or desktop. The error message seeing on the video being played frustrates users. This error can bounce them out from the website.

Corrective Measures

· Use HTML5 standard tags to integrate videos and animations, as they provide a smooth and seamless web experience across all browsers.

· Integrate videos using video embedding.

· Include the transcript of the animated or video content, as users can go through what you have to show up through your media content.

Erroneous Redirects

A wrong redirect can stop traffic from coming in, which eventually pushes down your web ranking. So, it is compulsory to redirect correctly from each desktop URL to the appropriate mobile URL.

Corrective Measures

· Avoid redirecting regardless of the URL that has been originally requested to browse to Home page.

· You can use Search Console to see where every URL is redirecting to on your smart phone.

· If you don’t have a provision to redirect to the URL for mobile phone, redirect to its desktop page.

· Use responsive web design for serving the same content for desktop and smartphone users.

Mobile-Only 404s

Sometimes, you serve content through the desktop URL to users. When you open in the mobile phone, it shows an error. This happening can make users angry.

Corrective Measures

· Redirect users to the URL for mobile device if you have different URLs for desktop and mobile phone. Avoid using 404 redirect in this case.

· Scan URLs in the Search Console to identify where the URLs are directing to.

· For smartphone site URL, it’s the best option to redirect users to that link.

· While using dynamic serving, do check if the user-agent detection is accurately configured.

· Transform web design into a responsive layout to serve the same content to users on all devices by default.

Don’t Integrate Interstitials

Interstitials are some call to action showing overlays to sign up or adverts, which partially or completely cover the web content. It happens during the web experience, which blocks users to complete any action. Certainly, it is adding to the bad experience of users.

Corrective Measures

· Rather than interstitials, use HTML banners or images that link to the app store for downloading.

· Use Smart App Banners for Safari and In-App Install Experience for Chrome.

When Cross Links Go Wrong

This is a very common error that often happens when a web designer configures mobile URLs with the desktop-optimised version. Similarly, he redirects the desktop page link to the mobile page. While doing so, some errors may occur, as an irrelevant link can be linked.

Corrective Measures

· Do check the Search Console to analyse the links and their redirects for correcting them.

Correctly Set Viewport

Users can use any device with different screen sizes. Ensure that your pages should have a viewport specification using a viewport meta tag. It indicates browsers to adjust page’s dimensions for delivering an excellent user experience.

Corrective Measures

· Take fixed-width for viewports to ensure that the page won’t scale well for all devices.

· Avoid assuming an unrealistically low width for viewport, which often leads to smaller view of the content.

· The pages should use relative width and position values for defining CSS elements.