Advantages and Disadvantages of Responsive Design

Google's latest recommendations are about using responsive design when creating mobile-friendly websites. In practice, a special layout is performed for this: when the user's browser loads the HTML code, the viewport meta tag is turned off. Because of it, the browser receives a signal that it needs to scale the page, fit it to the width of the screen.

Advantages

Thanks to high-quality adaptation, the site page is always displayed correctly - regardless of the screen size on which it is viewed. This provides an improvement in the position of the resource in the search results, because the robots take into account both the dynamic display and the mobile version. In addition, mobile issuance is only possible if the design is responsive. So, with it, behavioral indicators on the site obviously improve.

But there are also problems. And you need to know about them if you are going to implement adaptive design on your resource.

The Four Challenges of Responsive Design

1. With such designs, the content is displayed correctly, but the needs of mobile users are not always fully taken into account. Although this group has completely different requirements, because they view content quickly.
2. If the adaptation is done incorrectly, then desktop versions may be perceived worse by users. For example, bright large buttons from smartphones look ridiculous on a laptop screen. The large font is also incomprehensible, although it looks harmonious on a tablet. In desktop versions, text is better perceived than icons with pictures. And images on the whole screen are not needed here at all.
3. Responsive design does not change the page loading speed in any way. After all, the code for each version is loaded identically, only it is demonstrated differently. An excessive load on the smartphone processor is created for 2 reasons: the amount of information being downloaded and the download of full-size images. Only when the image is already loaded is it compressed to the correct size.
4. Responsive websites do not give users a choice: they will not be able to switch from the mobile version of the site to the standard one.

Of course, some of these shortcomings are successfully eliminated. But there is an alternative that allows you to adapt the resource to mobile traffic with less problems.