Responsive Web Design part 2
Thursday, 03-11-22, Nick Zoumpoulis
We have already presented Responsive Web Design on a previous article a few months ago and now we are back to analyze its use on the real world.
For this reason we decided to examine data from one of our own websites so as to understand the usefulness of this technology nowadays. The website chosen was calories.com.gr, which proved to be ideal since it enjoys high traffic rates including thousands of visitors every month.
We decided to analyze a period of 5 months, from 1st March 2015 until 1st August 2015, where we had a total of 360.204 sessions, 195.704 unique visitors, 1.448.698 pageviews with an average of 4.02 pages per session, 2:44 minutes average session duration and 57,37% bounce rate. Moreover, we would like to mention that the above statistics are almost equally shared between new and returning visitors and in percentages 51% and 49% respectively.
It is quite clear that the amount of data is more than enough to drive us towards the right conclusions in terms of website navigation through different devices.
We were quite surprised to see that only 51,17% of visitors where navigating through desktop computers and laptops. Instead, the remaining percentage is shared between high end mobile phones (40,23%) and tablet devices (8,60%). The above proves the intense need of Responsive Web design usage since almost half of our visitors were using portable devices.
If our project failed to provide multiple levels of navigation then a vast amount of visitors would leave the website right away with no intention to come back, ever again…
However, we were also impressed by the fact that users seem to behave differently based on the navigation device.
For instance, the bounce rate differs among devices (PC-Laptop, Mobile, Tablet), same scenario for the average session time as well as pages per session rate. As shown in the table above, our statistics indicate that high end mobile devices include less satisfactory results compared to other devices, and this is a paradox since this particular website scores 5/5 on Google’s mobile friendly tests and Google Adsense.
