A couple days ago, Google released a huge hint to web designers and developers as well as the business owners they serve in this blog post about responsive design.
And Google wasn’t weighing in on how YOU and I should be dealing with the issue of responsive design. They were talking about how THEY were dealing with it. There were several good tips in this post about making web content appear nicely across the wide array of devices and screens from desktops to tablets to smartphones. But the biggest tip was the one Google didn’t have to talk about. They had already spilled the beans. Google believes that responsive design (rather than a separate domain for mobile users) is the best way to ensure all visitors have a pleasant browsing experience and doing it right is a priority for Google on its own sites. If Google believes this is important, do you think perhaps you should give it some weight as well?
So, if you haven’t heeded our advice yet and incorporated responsive design principles into your site, perhaps you should listen to Google. And if you still aren’t convinced, check your Analytics and see where Google ranks in your list of traffic sources. (Then imagine what would happen if that source started thinking you don’t care about your website visitors.)