Why you should make your site responsive.

Since 2015:  Google released a new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that was designed to boost mobile-friendly pages in mobile search results. 

There are two ways to have a "mobile friendly" site

Option A: Build a completely seperate site (not recommended/not best practice)

Option B (Recommended): Make your current site "responsive" (e.g adapt to mobile devices). (Better Option!)

So why does Google like Option B Better: 

1. Makes it easier for users to share and link to your content with a single URL.
2. Helps Google's algorithms accurately assign indexing properties to the page rather than needing to signal the existence of corresponding desktop/mobile pages.
3. Reduces the possibility of the common mistakes that affect mobile sites.
4. Requires no redirection for users to have a device-optimized view, which reduces load time. Also, user agent-based redirection is error-prone and can degrade your site's user experience (see "Pitfalls when detecting user agents" section for details).
5. Saves resources when Googlebot crawls your site. For responsive web design pages, a single Googlebot user agent only needs to crawl your page once, rather than crawling multiple times with different Googlebot user agents to retrieve all versions of the content. This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of your site's content and keep it appropriately fresh.

If you need further advice, or would like to check if your site is responsive? Drop us a line. Or try using Google's Mobile - Friendly Tester here.