Welcome back to our series on Effective Dealership Website Design! If you’d like to revisit Part 1 before we begin with Part 2 below, read it here.

Today, we are moving on to responsive design and looking at why it is crucial for modern websites, including your car dealership site.

Why is Responsive Design So Important?

Before we delve into why this aspect of website design is so critical, let’s review precisely what responsive design is. In responsive web design, all pages and their content are flexible and adjust for optimized viewing across various screen resolutions and devices.

Think about viewing your dealership’s website on a large computer monitor or TV screen in landscape mode, then visiting the site on your smartphone in portrait mode. You wouldn’t expect the site layout to be exactly the same, would you?

Today, with so many screen resolutions across desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices, it is critical to create a pleasant viewing experience for every possible website visit. That’s where responsive design comes in!

With responsive design, your website and each user’s experience can be tailored for the device they are using to interact with the site.

In these screenshots, we see an example of a dealer’s new inventory page displayed on a laptop in landscape orientation, followed by the same area of the page in portrait orientation on a smartphone.

The laptop’s larger screen and higher resolution allow for ample white space, and the entirety of the vehicle snapshot is displayed in one view. When the page is viewed on the smartphone’s smaller screen in portrait landscape, the responsive website optimizes its available real estate by condensing the details displayed and featuring prominent buttons for ‘Buy Online’ and ‘Build Payment.’

Benefits of a Responsive Website

We’ve covered the basics of why responsive website design is vital to your dealership’s online presence, but let’s go a bit deeper.

Today, most consumers utilize multiple internet-enabled devices each day. From their smartphone and work computer to their tablet or personal laptop, we jump from device to device and expect a seamless experience.

When your customers can easily access your website across all of their digital devices, they are more likely to stay engaged with your site and return in the future. With more visits and more engagement, you will likely see higher conversion rates.

We all know that car buyers can spend days, weeks or months shopping and researching their options before making that final purchase decision. Why not make it easy for them to revisit your inventory and pull up vehicle specs and photos on any device?

Here are some of the many potential benefits of utilizing responsive design on your website:

• Flexible
• Mobile-friendly
• Improved user experience
• Increased engagement
• Decreased bounce rates
• Higher conversion rates
• Professional appearance across all platforms
• Ease of site management
• Cost-effective
• Gains in search engine optimization and rankings

Now that we’ve covered intuitive and responsive design in parts 1 and 2 of our series on Effective Website Design, we’ll move to our final installment. Stay tuned for Part 3 of the series, where we’ll go over the benefits of simplicity in website design!