Nowadays, almost every digital marketing agency Philippines receive an inquiry about ‘how can we make our website responsive.’ In a country where 89% of the people own a mobile phone and 53% own a smartphone, it is not surprising that companies would want these people to see their websites on their devices.

Online, there is a plethora of discussions about the benefits of responsive design. Nonetheless, there are only a few that tackles the benefits of putting responsive videos on responsive websites. This article aims to contribute to the meager literature regarding such.

 

The problem of unresponsive videos

If you think a responsive website makes all other elements such as images and videos responsive, you are wrong. There are instances when images appear ‘cropped’ thus the users only see a small portion of the image. The same goes with the embedded videos where only the play button is visible.

Simply, specific elements do not necessarily resize and fit the already limited screen space of the device used. An example of this element is iframe which is required to use when you embed video contents from external sources, for instance, such as YouTube, Vimeo and Vine.

By default, embedded videos are given fixed heights and widths. The videos are prevented from responding to the browser-related changes. The most important aspect of a responsive design is ensuring that all elements within the page are adapting gracefully to various screen sizes.

 

 

The benefits of responsive videos

Responsive design exploded in 2012, and 2013 was hailed as the year of responsive design. However, 2014 has seen more improvements that firms can manipulate at their disposal.

Below are some of the benefits of putting responsive videos on your website.

1) Reduce bounce rate

Mobile websites suffer from high bounce rates specifically when there is an evident inconsistency. Users will leave your responsive website if there are obtrusive videos, heavy video files, videos that are not playing, videos that cannot be view in full screen, etc. Google interprets high bounce rates as an indication that the website is not trustworthy enough and has irrelevant contents albeit videos, leading to a significant drop in ranking.

Responsive designs combat this as it presents all-responsive contents on the website. In putting responsive videos, for instance, there are no room for compromises on the choice of contents that the website displays. This means visitors are receiving the information that they are looking for in the first place, and thus keeping them on the page.

2) Enhance user experience (UX)

Going responsive is all about giving the users the experience that they want and prefer when interacting with websites. With this, responsive websites must still be user-friendly regardless of the size of screen that they are viewing your responsive website from.

Videos that fail to perform do not contribute in making the experience a pleasant one for the users. Designing for the users also means putting responsive elements that will work just perfectly.

3) Rank better and higher on SERP

SERP stands for search engine results page, or simply the Top 10. Google loves responsive design. In fact, Google is the biggest advocate of responsiveness in targeting mobile users. The search giant favors mobile-optimized websites when it presents results particularly on an inquiry made through a mobile device. Your responsive website will appear on SERP.

On the other hand, if anything on the website like the video is not responsive, Google might find difficulty determining whether the website is 100% mobile-optimized or not. Although mobile bots are not as sophisticated as the present algorithms, who knows, Google may not be able to crawl the entire page because of responsive-prohibitive elements.

 

Responsive design helps in appealing to modern users or those users who traverse the Internet using a mobile device. Call them millennials, if you want. The bottom line is they expect that a responsive website contains elements that are also responsive. As such, putting responsive videos is a surefire way of making most of the mobile-browsing experience.

 

Sources: Designers.Hubspot.com | SmashingMagazine.com | CSS-Tricks.com | SearchEngineJournal.com | KISSmetrics.com

Image credit: TheJTSite.com