Mobile phones have become everything for us.
The statement may seem like an exaggeration, but it is not. In our day to day life smartphones have become an absolute necessity.
From ordering food to keeping track of our health, smartphones are being used for almost everything today. And that happens to be an amazing advantage for businesses worldwide.
With the widespread popularity of smartphones, businesses now have a new portal of reaching the people.
According to stats, in the first quarter of 2017, around 50% of web traffic came from mobile devices!
And the popularity of smartphones only indicates that this number is going to rise even more.
This change is the most used device to access the web has brought on some change in how a website is designed. What was standard practice once is not applicable anymore, as the designs now have to be compatible with devices with smaller screens.
And to achieve this, the most used techniques happen to be adaptive web design and responsive web design.
Even though both techniques serve the same purpose, their inner workings are vastly different. So before you choose a method for a mobile suited website, let’s find out what they actually and how they are different.
Adaptive Web Design: What Is It?
The process of adaptive web design starts with the designers creating differently sized layouts for different screen sizes.
The layout sizes depend on various factors, such as the device being used, the web browser, the pixel size of the screen and many more. And that’s why the designers would have to design different layouts for a screen width of 960 pixels, 1200 pixels and so on.
Once the layouts are designed, the process for server-side detection starts. When the user is trying to load the website on their browser, the server-side detection process will detect the device that is being used and load the layout most suited for the device. The entire process is that of “the website adapting to the device screen.”
Even though it is an effective way of designing a mobile-friendly website, the process has one simple drawback.
There are already numerous devices out there with different screen sizes, and more devices are coming out every day.
It is quite impossible to design a layout for each and every one of these devices. Instead of doing that, the designers can create layouts for approximate measurements and that opens up chances of imperfections.
Meaning of responsive web design
While AWD is using multiple website layouts to deliver a mobile-friendly version of the site to the user, Responsive website design uses only one fluid layout.
This type of layout scales up and down according to the device screen resolution. To do this, designers use techniques such as CSS manipulation or media queries.
In the case of RWD, the designers would follow an image to the content ratio for the web pages. This ratio would be the same for all screen resolutions, therefore not causing any problems or imperfections regarding the many different sizes of screens out there.
Initially, it may seem like designing a responsive web page is easier than an adaptive web page, since you have to deal with only one layout.
However, working with responsive web design means you are actually designing a website layout for an infinite number of screen sizes out there. This means there is a lot more coding to it than the adaptive website design.
Difference Between The Two
So now that we know that both responsive and adaptive web design accomplishes the same thing, it is time to compare them.
Depending on the inner workings, there are three main differences between the two web design techniques.
1. Design Effort
When it comes to design effort, there are significant differences between Responsive web design and Adaptive web design.
Designing an adaptive website might seem hard since you have to design multiple layouts of the same website for different screen resolutions. It seems like a repetitive and tedious task. But responsive website design needs a lot more effort.
When designing a responsive website, the designer is basically creating only one layout that will be used for all the screen resolutions out there. This needs a lot more codework and effort from the designers.
Compared to adaptive website design, responsive web design takes more work since the designers need to pay more attention to CSS and many other features to make sure that the website works with any possible screen size. The high flexibility of the responsive web design takes a lot more effort from the designers.
2. Flexibility In Web page Display
Even though it is built to be mobile-friendly, adaptive is still not flexible in the matter of web page display. The final result in the case of Adaptive web page design is not always perfect for all screen sizes since the layouts are designed to match the approximate size of the screen, not completely fitted to it.
Responsive designs, on the other hand, are fitted to every screen. The one layout designed for a responsive website is more flexible than all the layouts designed for an adaptive website. And that’s why when it comes to flexibility, responsive web design wins the game.
3. The Loading Speed Of The Website
There is a significant difference between loading speed between a responsive website and an adaptive website. Any adaptive website will have to load all the possible layout that matches the device best, and that takes time. Responsive on the other hand, need to load only one layout of the website that will scale according to the device screen resolution.
The more layouts there are for one adaptive website, the slower it will be. However, this scenario can change if the websites differ in page numbers. An adaptive website with less than 10 pages will load faster than a responsive website with more than 100 pages.
4. How Easy Is It To Maintain?
When it comes to maintenance, responsive is a lot more preferred by developers and designers.
Sure it takes a lot of initial effort to build a responsive website, but ultimately, maintaining it is easier. For an adaptive website, the designers would have to manually update each layout for any kind of update to the on-site content. However, for responsive, the designers have to make a change to only one layout. This makes further maintenance of the website a lot easier.
5. Fluidity Of The Layout
Responsive web layouts are more fluid than adaptive ones. To check this, all you have to do is resize the browser using your mouse on the desktop. Responsive websites will seamlessly adjust the content on the page as the browser size decreases, but an adaptive website will only rearrange the page content after certain jump points.
The fluidity of the layout affects user experience a lot, and that means choosing responsive makes for better user experience.
So we have talked about both adaptive and responsive website design and their main differences. But which one should you choose?
Which One Is Better Suited For You?
It goes without saying that every website needs to be mobile-friendly today, especially since Google is favoring websites with mobile-first designs and penalizing websites that do not have a mobile version. So which mobile-friendly web design method should you choose?
At the end of the day, it comes down to whether you are building a website from scratch or are you retrofitting your website for this mobile age.
In case you are building a new website from scratch, you can and should choose the Responsive design method. It will take a little extra effort at the initial stage, but at later stages maintenance will be easy.
Whether you hire a responsive web design company or use one of the many responsive web design templates available online, going responsive to your first website will be a better option.
On the other hand, if you are retrofitting your website for mobile use, choosing adaptive will be a better option. You can use tools like google analytics to gather data on what mobile devices are most used by your visitors and design website layouts for those devices. It will take a lot less time and effort to turn your existing website mobile friendly with adaptive web design.
Whether you choose responsive or adaptive, you need to make sure that it creates a user-friendly website.
Remember that at the end of the day it all comes down to satisfying the users with your website’s design! So plan accordingly.
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This post was previously published on Medium.com and is republished here with permission from the author.
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