5 Reasons Why Responsive Web Design is a Must for Your Eye Care Website

Smartphones have become such a big part of our lives, it’s hard to imagine a day without them. Thanks to this technology, mobile traffic has skyrocketed in recent years. Today, mobile traffic accounts for 50.5% of all traffic. In comparison, “only” 46.5% of traffic comes from desktop and laptop computers. Practicegrowth.com traffic is approximately 55%/45% desktop to mobile at the time.

With that in mind, optimizing your website for both desktop and mobile devices is a no-brainer. That’s especially true if you’re in the eye care business. You don’t want potential patients to leave your website because they can’t navigate easily and find what they need.

What is a Responsive Website?

When browsing the internet, most websites are easy to navigate using a computer. But when you switch to your mobile phone, some of them might prove difficult to use due to the phone’s smaller screen. And that’s where responsive website design comes in.

Besides being optimized for small screens, your website will also look great on different computer monitors and screen resolutions. With responsive design, most of the elements on your website should have a minimalistic approach. That way you'll ensure a universal visual appearance, regardless of the device your visitors are using.

Instead of building a separate website for mobile devices, responsive design allows you to have only one website. Depending on the screen size and type of your device, these websites automatically adapt their layout and content. Thanks to its universal nature, responsive design provides the best viewing experience to your visitors, across all platforms.

If you’re on the fence about optimizing your existing website to become responsive or building in the requirement for your next web development, consider the advantages. Here are the top five reasons for choosing this approach.

1. Reaching a Wider Audience

As stated above, mobile devices generate half of all internet traffic. By optimizing your website to become mobile-friendly, you’re able to appeal to a much wider audience. Plus, you do it at a fraction of cost, compared to having separate desktop and mobile versions of your website.

With a responsive website you no longer depend on the device someone uses to visit your page. If not, chances are you’ll lose a lot of prospective patients. When someone searches for optometrists in their area, they’ll get a lot of results. If they visit your website and it doesn’t provide quality information in a clear way, they’ll probably move to another website. You will be judged harshly, especially by native digital generations like young Gen X, millennial, and Gen Zs.  

Having a responsive website translates to your marketing plans as well. Instead of having two separate marketing strategies for mobile and desktop users, now you’ll have one. This saves a lot of time and effort, allowing you to fully focus on a single campaign at any moment.

2. Better Ranking on Google

One of the most important goals for your website is to have a strong (hopefully dominant) presence in search results. In Google search, responsive websites rank way higher than those lacking this optimization. Even more, if your website isn’t responsive, Google will penalize you for that. This might make you almost invisible in the search results.

Although this might seem cruel and censorious, it actually isn’t. To stay relevant, Google is always looking for ways to provide the best search results possible. That’s why their algorithm takes into account how well you’ve optimized your website’s navigation.

If you don’t have a responsive website, Google won’t include you in the results for anyone who’s searching from their smartphone. Although no one knows all the details of their search algorithm, chances are this will negatively affect your desktop version as well.

3. Attract More Patients

One of the main purposes of having a website is converting your visitors into patients. When a prospective patient visits your website, you don’t want them to turn away because of poor navigation. You want to keep them there.

Having a good conversion rate on the desktop version of your website may come from a decent sales funnel. As a marketing method, sales funnels direct your visitors from the point where they become aware of your online presence, to the moment when they become a paying customer. Naturally, developing a funnel that provides decent conversion of visitors to customers works takes a lot of time and effort. Of course,, , as well as  this will involve certain financial investments as well. With all that in mind, It it would be a real shame to squander this opportunity that by not providing appropriate experience for the mobile users as well.

Responsive design gives you an edge over your competition.  If you allow your visitors to conveniently navigate your website, it’s certain they’ll stay longer. This way they’ll be able to access any information they need, ultimately contacting you to ask questions or schedule an appointment.

4. Improving Communication

The desktop version of your website allows you to provide more information to your visitors in a single screen. Your homepage can include some brief information about your practice. You can place contact details at the top of the page. If you offer various eye care services, you can also include a separate menu on the left side of the screen or in the header navigation. This will provide simple guidance for your visitors, allowing them to quickly get all the information they need.

In comparison, a mobile version doesn’t have that kind of screen space. Unfortunately, this will limit the amount of content you can provide at once. To counter this issue, you can optimize the mobile experience by prioritizing certain elements over others and making this a serious point of discussion with your website development team.  

For example, you might want to encourage prospective patients to call your office as soon as they visit your website. Having a responsive website, you can do that quite easily. When they visit your website from a smartphone, you can include a call to action on your homepage. Greet them by offering a free consultation call and display your contact number.

5. Providing Better Patient Experience

Finally, it all comes downcomes to down to user experience. By providing all the relevant information in the most convenient way, you’ll enhance the user experience. Having a responsive website will optimize the menus and guide visitors to find what they need.

As you already know, your desktop version can handle a pretty rich navigation menu. Once someone visits your mobile version, they won’t have that kind of luxury due to the small screen. That’s where responsive design comes in, allowing you to group all that information into just a few sections.

For example, you can have a simple menu that contains only four options:

• Services
• Contact
• About
• FAQ

As a result, your visitors won’t have to scroll all over the page to find the information they need. Also, by optimizing the size of text and images, you’ll eliminate any need for zooming in and out. All of that will significantly increase the experience your prospective patients have on your website. In turn, there’s a great chance they’ll reward you by choosing your practice over the others.

Becoming Responsive

Hopefully, this article helped you understand how important it is to make your website look good on mobile devices. Besides providing a great patient experience, it will help your website rank higher on Google. Having an optimized website will also increase the number of potential patients, as it allows for easy navigation. Allowing website visitors to get relevant information fast will eventually prompt them to schedule an appointment with you.

There are many development solutions for responsive design.  Bootstrap is a good one. It’s an open-source CSS framework directed at responsive, mobile-first front-end web development, that helps bring development time and costs down.

Is your eye-care website responsive already? If not, are you thinking about optimizing it for mobile devices? Put responsive design at the top of your requirements document when hiring a web development company.