What is better for mobile: responsive design or adaptive design?

Is Responsive Design or Adaptive Design Better for Mobile?

You must know by now that Mobile Responsive development can not be ignored anymore. More and more people are using mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to go onto websites. Your website should be easy to view on mobile devices; otherwise, you are going to start losing visitors and get less traffic to your site.

Both adaptive and responsive can help prepare your website for mobile use but in different ways. You will need to look at which one is best suited for your website, budgets and goals. Always contact a professional London web design company for assistance when dealing with website project such as responsive or adaptive websites.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive Web Design gives the user the best viewing experience of your website on any device you use. This makes the website easy to read, navigate with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling across a wide range of devices.

This is done by using fluid grids. This is a term for a design that works no matter what the screen size is. So no matter how much you resize the screen, the same layout will automatically respond to that size.

Adaptive Web Design

Adaptive Web Design is the more difficult format to use. It requires extra attention to the sites CSS and organisation to make sure it functions well at any possible size. It is easier to make a few specific layouts for your website, instead of creating one layout that can work in any screen size. This means that each adaptive design needs a bit of flexibility to work on several screen sizes. It is easier and quicker to make just one layout that works for all device screen size.

Adaptive sites are Less Flexible

The one drawback of adaptive designs is that they dont always display the best for a wide variety of screen sizes. Whilst responsive website designs are going to work well on any screen size; adaptive designs only work on as many screens as its layouts can. So if a new device has a different screen size than any of your layouts, you may find that your website won’t fit with the device very well.

You will have to add a new layout or edit one of your layouts. Responsive sites are flexible enough to keep working on their own, but adaptive site are most likely news some maintenance.

Responsive Sites Load Faster

In 2021 load time is so important. An adaptive website needs to load all possible layouts while responsive websites will only need to load one layout that works across all devices. All of the extra layouts on adaptive sites will take extra time and resources so they will be slower than responsive sites.

This won’t always be the case, but when you have a site with a large number of pages compared to an adaptive site which only has a small number of pages, the adaptive one might be faster.