What is the need of Responsive Web Design? 

The key purpose and the idea of responsive design are to have one website, but with different elements that respond differently when viewed on devices of different sizes i.e., A website should be mobile friendly as per Google recommendations.

With the extreme rise in the use of mobile devices and increasing mobile users, webmasters are doing themselves huge disfavor if the website is not designed to respond and adjust to mobile screens and other devices like PC, tablets, etc.

Responsive website design is a modern approach for designing a website as it makes web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or different screen sizes.

Even many web design and development companies recommend responsive web design so as to improve user experiences and also decreases the bounce rate.

Recent work also considers the viewer proximity as part of the viewing context as an extension for responsive web design.

Tips For making your website design responsive:

• Set the viewport.
• Use the meta viewport tag to control the width and scaling of the browser’s viewport.
• Include width=device-width to match the screen’s width in device-independent pixels.
• Include initial-scale=1 to establish a 1:1 relationship between CSS pixels and device-independent pixels.
• Ensure your page is accessible by not disabling user scaling.
• Size content to the viewport.
• Do not use large fixed width elements.
• Content should not rely on a particular view-port width to render well.
• Use CSS media queries to apply different styling for small and large screens.
• Use CSS media queries for responsiveness.
• Use media queries to apply styles based on device characteristics.
• Use min-width over min-device-width to ensure the broadest experience.
• Use relative sizes for elements to avoid breaking layout.
• Choose breakpoints.
• Create breakpoints based on content, never on specific devices, products, or brands.
• Design for the smallest mobile device first; then progressively enhance the experience as more screen real estate becomes available.
• Keep lines of text to a maximum of around 70 or 80 characters.

Google Recommendations:

Google clarifies that it prefers responsive website design as now a days 60-70% of users are active on mobile devices so it makes it more important to have responsive pages on the website.

But question arises, Why does Google prefer responsive web design?