Google announced that is March 2021, they will move to mobile first indexing. This means that google will 100% index on the all of the website mobile view rather than its desktop view. Why so? Because about 90% of all the website in Google’s search engine results pages are already mobile responsive. With the advent of smartphones and introduction to fast speed mobile internet, people are more likely to access any website through their device rather desktop, in this day and age, google is adapting to what users will be more comfortable of using. So better not be left out, if you have an existing website or planning to make one, make sure it is responsive.

What is a responsive website?

Designing your content for different view screens is a daunting task for web designers all over. Mobile screens are design to be in a viewport of 600px and below while the desktop screens can reach up to 2000px wide. In web design, the first pane is always the most crucial stage in your website, and having your content appear in both screens usually affect how people perceive your website.

Initially, web designers would solve this question by creating different webpage on each view screens. This however is not a viable solution in the long term due to the fact the maintaining multiple pages in a small content change can be daunting to a webmaster.

In May 2010, the famous foreign web designer Ethan Marcotte propose the new concept of “responsive web design”, or adaptive web design. This new form of web design lets you seamlessly work through the different view screens in one consistent content flow.

What are the advantages of a responsive web design?

1. Allow users to share and link to your website more easily through 1 URL.

2. It helps Google’s algorithm to accurately assign index attributes to webpages without specifying the existence of corresponding desktop/mobile webpages.

3. There is no need to maintain multiple web pages with the same content, thereby reducing the required engineering time.

4. Reduce the possibility of common errors that affect the mobile version of the website.

5. Save resources when Googlebot crawls your website. For web pages with adaptive design, a Googlebot user agent only needs to perform one crawl (no need to use different Googlebot’s to implement multiple crawls) to retrieve all versions of the corresponding content. Increasing crawl efficiency can indirectly assist Google to index more content on the site and ensure that the crawled content is up to date.

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