Responsive Is Always Better Than Separate Designs

I came across several questions on Quora asking about the same thing: would it be better to use one responsive design for a website, or to create separate designs of the same website for different devices? First of all, let me give the verdict straight away: one responsive design is better, way better. Now let’s discuss both the options and look at why one responsive design is the better way to go about developing a website. For ease of reference, I will refer to the one responsive design as simply “responsive”, and the separate designs as “multi-design”.

Using one responsive design is the much better approach by a significantly far stretch. In fact, I could not think of any significant advantage the multi-design approach has over the responsive approach. The responsive approach which gained popularity since over ten years ago, has now become the gold standard in website design practices. Which is why I was quite surprised that some people on the Internet are claiming that they received recommendations (from undisclosed sources) to opt for the multi-design approach over the responsive approach. I asked ChatGPT to list down the advantages of using the multi-design approach (and no, this article was not written by ChatGPT, in case you’re wondering), and ChatGPT managed to list down two advantages of using the multi-design approach. The two advantages of the multi-design approach according to ChatGPT are (i) that it allows for tailoring the user experience specifically for desktop and mobile users, optimizing performance and design for each, and (ii) that the mobile-specific sites can be optimized for speed and efficiency, potentially providing a faster experience for mobile users. While these advantages are valid, I will point out why they are not significant advantages over the responsive approach.

Now let’s look at some of the reasons why the responsive approach is always better.

#1 – Unified Codebase

Using the responsive approach, you only have one codebase to develop and maintain. With the multi-design approach, you will have a different codebase for each of the different layouts – which as you can imagine will pose complexities. By having only one codebase, maintenance and updates are made simpler as you only have one codebase to work on. More importantly, by having only one codebase to work on you significantly reduce the chances of errors and inconsistencies on your website.

#2 – Cost-effective

As you only have one codebase to work on with the responsive approach, your workload and resources needed will also be reduced as compared to the multi-design approach. Managing just one website (one codebase) as opposed to managing multiple websites will also be cheaper, and more effective.

#3 – Better SEO

Modern search engines prefer a responsive website. A website that’s built using the responsive approach will receive a much higher ranking in search engines. Also, using the responsive approach you will have a single URL address for all the different layouts of the website, which will help to consolidate SEO efforts – as opposed to breaking it up when using the multi-design approach – and avoid duplicate content issues, and simplifying sharing and linking of pages.

#4 – Consistent User Experience

Lots of users will visit your website using multiple devices. Building your website using the responsive approach will help to ensure a much more consistent and seamless user experience across different devices. Using the multi-design approach will most probably result in inconsistent user experience as some important features could be missing from certain versions of the website – this was what happened with Facebook, back when they were using the multi-design approach.

#5 – Future-Proof

With the responsive approach, your website will adapt its layout automatically (based on the styling breakpoints you’ve set) to the different screen sizes of different devices. Responsive approach may also adapt its design based on the type of screen (e.g.: touch, non-touch). Because of that, a website that is built using the responsive approach is more future-proof as the website will be able to adapt its layout to new devices and screen sizes automatically.

Now, as I have mentioned before, there is the notion that using the multi-design approach can be a better option. It actually is not.

One of the reasons (listed by ChatGPT) to use the multi-design approach over the responsive approach is because you can fully optimize the performance of your website for each different devices. This might be true, but the benefits you will get by using the multi-design approach to get an optimized version of your website for each different device is outweighed heavily by its drawbacks: it will cost more, it will take more time for development and maintenance or updates, and it may cause significant consistency issues in user experience. One thing to fully understand is that in the discipline of web development nowadays, there are more than two devices to consider. The multi-design approach was once quite practical because there were only two devices to consider: a computer (desktop or laptop) and a mobile phone. Nowadays, there is a plethora of different devices and different screen sizes to consider (think: laptops, smart TVs, small phones, large phones, folding phones, tablets, etc.), making the multi-design approach highly cost-ineffective and highly susceptible to inconsistencies.

Another factor listed as the reason to favouring the multi-design approach is that you can provide a faster experience of your website on each device (as its optimized for that device). Again, this reason may be practical once upon a time ago; but nowadays as the Internet connection everywhere is getting faster and faster, and devices are getting “smarter” and more sophisticated, there wouldn’t be much of a difference (if any) in terms of the user experience speed of websites developed using the responsive approach and those using the multi-design approach.

So, again, the bottom line is: make sure your web development project is using the responsive approach. However, if you do have better reasons on why a multi-design approach can be a better choice, I would love to hear about it.