A Responsive Web Design (RWD) Guide | For AMP Ready Websites

As a matter of fact, Responsive Web Design (RWD) and Page Builder Layouts are mandatory for AMP-Ready and responsive websites. To enumerate,  according to our content design and developers, there is more to AMP readiness. What’s more, AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Not forgetting, responsive page builder layouts were first introduced by Google in October 2015.

Also, not to mention, AMP is an open-source custom web development framework. In general, created to speed up the loading time of web pages on mobile devices. Thus, responsive web design has become the standard way of designing websites over the past couple of years. In fact, as a way of ensuring that a site is readable and usable on a range of viewing devices.

Basically, the acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages is that it’s an open-source HTML framework developed by the AMP Open Source Project. Originally, it was created by Google as a competitor to Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News that’s optimized for mobile web browsing. Notably, AMP is intended to help the website pages load a little bit faster.

Realistically, from smartphones to tablets to large PC browsers, the vast majority of websites that the jmexclusives team builds now for their customers in Africa and beyond are designed to be AMP Ready as well as Mobile Responsive (accessible on all gadgets). For this reason, this guide is for all beginner webmasters who would want to learn how to do it right.

What Responsive Web Design (RWD) Entails

Responsive website design involves designing a site that automatically adjusts itself. And the way it displays content, depending on the size of the viewing device. Chiefly, the website detects the dimensions of the viewing device and follows page viewing rules. Especially coded within the website itself, and particular aspects which are typically self-adjusted to work.

These elements will act this way:

• Images are automatically resized to fit within the screen.
• Text wraps dynamically as the screen width is reduced.

Elements on the page rearrange themselves to fit e.g. elements arranged horizontally on a wide screen will switch to a vertical arrangement on a narrow screen. That said, surfing the internet with a mobile device is the norm nowadays, and knowing how to make a mobile responsive website has become more and more important.

Imagine if someone visited your website, and it looked pretty terrible on their mobile device, what do you think they will do next? My bet is that they might leave and look elsewhere. It’s tough enough to get a visitor to your site, so having them leave because your website didn’t look very user-friendly on a mobile device is a really big problem.

Is RWD Design The Same As AMP Development?

No, not at all! For one thing, mobile website design involves designing a site to work specifically on mobile phones with small viewing screens, but not on larger browsers. This involves having two sites, usually on two separate domains. One of which is optimized for small mobile screens and one which is optimized for larger screens.

“The AMP Project was announced by Google on October 7, 2015. It was intended to improve the performance of the mobile web. More than 30 news publishers and several technology companies (including Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and WordPress) were initially announced as collaborators in the AMP Project.” ~ according to Wikipedia.

Google began displaying AMP pages in mobile search results in February 2016. You have assuredly come across AMP pages while performing mobile searches. AMP pages are easily distinguished as they include a tiny lightning bolt symbol. Let’s take a deeper look below at AMP search results and what type of browsing experience they offer mobile users.

And while this was a good interim solution for some sites, for a while, it was not a good long-term approach for a few reasons.

Some of these reasons are as follows:

• You have two sites to operate and maintain, instead of one, which doubles the workload and creates version control issues (to keep the sites consistent with each other).
• Having two separate domains means you have 2 sites competing for search engine traffic instead of one, so SEO effort is increased. For instance, all the backlinks that may be helping your desktop-friendly site will not provide any SEO benefit to your mobile-friendly site.

When trying to differentiate between RWD and AMP, there are a few pros and cons that you should know about first. And, as such, below are some of them that are worth mentioning herein:

RWD: Usually, it focuses on flexibility, allowing your website to be displayed on various devices by adjusting itself accordingly.

The Main Pros:

• Responsive sites look modern and match the latest web standards
• No need to develop a separate website
• Only need to update one website

The Notable Cons:

• Time-consuming development
• Slow loading due to unnecessary HTML/CSS
• Compatibility issues for the older versions of some browsers

AMP: As for this one, web pages are designed singularly to serve content instantly on mobile devices.

The Key Pros:

• Improve load time on mobile
• Improve server response
• Increase click-through rate (CTR)
• Standard mobile optimization for different websites
• Improve Search Engine Ranking on Mobile browsers

The Basic Cons:

• JS and CSS limitations
• Serving Google cached pages
• Decrease in Ad Revenue
• Implementation is not easy

Google shows available AMP versions of the pages when the relevant queries are searched by users. Moreover, the AMP pages are served through Google’s server to achieve a fast load speed. So, in simple, non-techie terms, a mobile responsive website is a website that detects what device your visitor is using (a smartphone, a tablet, or a desktop computer).

And then, it automatically adjusts the layout of your website to conform to the size of the device that’s being used. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that a mobile phone screen is much smaller than a tablet screen, which is much MUCH smaller than a desktop/laptop computer screen.

Why Responsive Web Design Is A Must For All Webmasters

There are many reasons why web design matters for businesses. One simple reason for needing responsive web design is the massive growth in mobile internet usage. As an example, over the past 5 years, due to the huge take-up of smartphones and tablets among consumers. It’s becoming increasingly common for households to contain only smartphones and tablets, with no desktop PC at all.

This trend meant that in 2015 the number of mobile searches exceeded the number of desktop searches for the first time. In other words, internet users are looking for what they want using mobile devices more than half the time. So it makes sense to ensure that they can find your site using their mobile device, and can easily read and interact with it when they do.

The need for a responsive website design was becoming inevitable. But the point was given extra urgency when Google changed its search algorithm in April 2015. Explicitly favoring sites with a mobile-friendly design, and beginning to penalize sites without. This saw a widespread move to responsive designs, especially among companies keen to retain their Google rankings.

Resource Reference: How To Improve Google Results Ranking For Position #1 Site Search

In 2014, an estimated 11% of websites were responsive. In 2015 this had shifted to more than 80%, with the percentage increasing even more in 2016. It’s becoming so commonplace, in fact, that in some places you will see the acronym “RWD” being used instead of “responsive web design”. So, with that being said, is it difficult to update a website to be responsive?

Fortunately, given the right tools of the trade, it has become progressively easier to switch to a responsive website design than ever. And any good website design agency should offer this as a standard service for new site design or redesigning an existing site. Suffice it to say, some of the topmost web design tools have already been developed to meet this trend.

Whilst, making it easier for web designers to achieve sites that are both mobile-friendly and highly attractive. And, going for professional website designers to do it for you, especially, those with established web design agencies, will be a very great start for you/your web business. Since they already have the skills and experience necessary to deliver a responsive website.

How Quickly Do We Need To Act?

A year since its original announcement about favoring mobile responsive sites, Google has now announced its intentions. As an example, to further increase the preference given to sites with a responsive design.

Further, penalizing non-responsive sites in mobile search results. Surprisingly, providing additional impetus to site owners who have not yet made the switch. How quickly any particular site needs to update its site depends on the following:

1. How much mobile traffic the site already gets: A site that gets a lot of mobile traffic now could progressively lose traffic if visitors find the site difficult to use compared to competitor sites.

2. How much mobile traffic the site could potentially get: Even if a site does not depend much on mobile traffic now, it could be significantly limiting its ability to grow its traffic by ignoring the growing mobile search market.

3. How well the site ranks in Google for desktop or mobile searches: Those with good rankings currently, stand to lose rankings, traffic, and business over time if they do not switch soon.

4. Whether competitor sites have switched yet: If all your competitors have responsive sites you need to consider switching as soon as possible. If few or none of them have switched, you may have more time. But, you would give yourself a significant competitive advantage by making the change ahead of your competitors.

But, that’s not all! One thing is for sure, apart from rankings, there are other benefits. One of the major benefits of using a responsive design is the positive impact it has on the overall customer experience. A site that is easy to use and always makes sense on whatever size screen or browser is being used, will contribute to keeping customers on your site.

Ultimately, this increases the chances of a visitor turning into a paying customer or lead for your business. Even without the Google factor, this makes a compelling case for moving to a responsive design.

The Best AMP Readiness And Responsive Web Pages Design Plan

Google AMP is a website publishing technology that lets you create web pages that load almost instantly on mobile phones. The big difference between the two technologies is that you’re not limited. In particular to embedding AMP pages on one platform like you are with Instant Articles.

So, in other words, an Accelerated Mobile Page (or AMP, for short) is a project from Google and Twitter. Designed to make really fast mobile pages. At its essence, it’s basically a stripped-down form of HTML, a diet HTML if you will.

Equally important, with no guesswork, AMP Responsive Web page built-in provides a component framework. With the general intention to easily create user-first friendly pages. May it be emails, stories, websites, ads, or even Accelerated Mobile Pages for Blogs. Learn more about AMP.

The Main Responsive Web Page Layouts Design Benefits

Before we proceed, it is important we ask; What are Responsive Web Templates? Therefore, with this question in mind, we can simply say that; Responsive web design, or RWD, formats a webpage layout. Generally, in order to be fluid for optimal viewing and navigation across a wide range of devices. Including traditional PC and Mac desktop and laptop computers.

As well as stablet and surface, smartphones, and all other mobile devices and gadgets. In a nutshell, responsive web design is a way to make a website look and behave correctly on every device you could use to access it – desktop, smartphone, tablet, and more. Below are other additional benefits of making your website business both RWD-responsive and AMP-ready.

1. Experience

Web page speed improves the overall User Experience (UX) and core business metricsAMP pages load nearly instantly, enabling you to offer a consistently fast experience across all devices and platforms.

2. Development

Building AMP pages is easy and reduces developer overhead. You can often convert your entire archive in days especially if you use a popular CMS such as WordPress or Drupal.

3. Application

AMP can be applied across various web touchpoints. Used by popular and global platforms like Google, Bing, and Twitter, AMP allows you to ensure users from all these surfaces get an unparalleled, often instantaneous, and native-feeling experience by defaulting to AMP pages when available.

4. Flexibility

Maintain flexibility and control and reduce complexity in your code. You can use CSS to customize your styling, and dynamic data to fetch the freshest data where needed, to build the best possible user experience for your customers.

5. Futuristic

When it comes to responsive web design and AMP readiness, there are building blocks that ensure performance. It takes a lot of time and effort to build a great website. AMP components are already optimized for the best performance. Build for a sustainable future in the open web for everyone. The AMP Project is an open-source initiative to protect the future of the web helping everyone deliver a better, faster more user-friendly experience.

How To Build Responsive Web Design (RWD) For AMP-Readiness

As we aforementioned, the main purpose of AMP technology is to serve web content instantly on mobile devices. They are web pages that are created by following a new set of coding standards set by AMP technology developers. While, at the same time, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) are HTML pages that are lightweight, fast, and far more user-friendly.

And, as a result, whether you are a publisher, e-commerce company, storyteller, advertiser, or email sender, Accelerated Mobile Pages make it easy to create great experiences on the web. AMPs are one of Google’s preferred methods of delivering mobile web pages, and Site Audit checks over 40 of the most common AMP-related issues, more than any other software on the market.

They are important because they help web pages load faster. And, for one thing, this potentially improves usability. Equally important, they convince visitors to stay longer on your website engaging with your content. Whether you are a publisher, e-commerce company, storyteller, advertiser, or email sender, AMPs make it easy to create great experiences on the web.

The Topmost Responsive Web Design (RWD) WordPress Page Builders 

Surfing the internet with a mobile device is the norm nowadays and knowing how to make a mobile responsive website has become more and more important. Imagine if someone visited your website, and it looked pretty terrible on their mobile device, what do you think they will do next? My bet is that they might leave and look elsewhere.

In reality, it’s quite tough enough to get a visitor to your site. Therefore, having them leave because your website didn’t look very user-friendly on a mobile device is a really big problem. Perse, knowing how to create a mobile responsive website is actually quite critical to your success.

It’s, important to realize that through WordPress, it is very easy to output responsive page builder layouts. Lucrative and impressive to the users as well as content editors. With this in mind, let’s take a look at the best drag-and-drop page builder plugins for WordPress. And now, in that case, you can follow the links provided below for additional page builders information.

Including:

1. Beaver Builder
2. The Divi Builder
3. Elementor
4. Themify Builder
5. Thrive-Architect
6. SiteOrigin Page Builder
7. WPBakery Page Builder (formerly Visual Composer)

It’s tough enough to get a visitor to your site, so having them leave because your website didn’t look very user-friendly on a mobile device is a really big problem. So, knowing how to create a mobile responsive website is actually quite critical to your success.

The Parent/Child Pages Role In Responsive Web Design 

This means that a page can become a parent page and has child pages. For example, the sub-pages under it. This allows you to group different pages together under one parent page.

For instance, if you have a Product Page on a website, then you can add affiliated pages. Such as Features, Pricing, and Support as child pages. Do you want to create a child page on your Website? Pages in WordPress can be standalone or hierarchical. Of course, which means a page can have its own sub-pages also known as child pages.

In summary, there is a major difference between WordPress posts and pages. For one thing, the WordPress post is a dynamic entity and the WordPress page is a static entity. While at the same time WordPress Posts is a dynamic entity that has a published/updated date. Particularly being displayed on the blog page.

Whether you are just a publisher, an e-commerce company, a storyteller, an advertiser, or an email sender, AMP makes it all easy. Especially, for establishing a responsive web page-building process. In addition to creating great experiences on the web that everyone — including SERPs like Google/Bing, UI repositories, and target users — can all enjoy.

More Related Resource References:

1. How To Create A Child Page On Your WordPress Website
2. Accelerated Mobile Page Free Guide For Beginner Webmasters
3. How To Display A List Of Child Pages For A Parent Page In WordPress

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Finally, we are hoping that the guide above is useful in relating to your RWD website mastery journey. However, if you’ll have any issues while enabling your website or blog for AMP, please feel free to Contact Us at any time and let us know. Furthermore, our team of Web Tech Experts Taskforce will be more than glad to sort you out.

Last but not least, you are also welcome to share your additional thoughts, opinions, recommendations, or even contribution questions (for FAQ Answers) in our comments section. You can also send us your website design proposals for our team to give you a free quote. Likewise, feel free to Donate in support of what we do as well as to motivate us for the good work…