Responsive Web Design is hot. Practically every company I speak to, around the globe, is either going responsive, has gone responsive, or – at the very least – giving it serious consideration. So, with all this buzz, how many websites are actually responsive?
A few weeks ago I posted the results of a research testing the top 10,000 websites for responsive indicators. The test showed roughly 12% of these sites were responsive, a ratio that was fairly consistent across the top 100, 1,000 and 10,000 sites.
I’ve been on a bit of a quest to find out how many responsive websites are out there. In a recent post, I describe a decent way to track the adoption rate of the “One Web” concept, but that technique doesn’t work well for tracking responsive design.
Responsive Web Design has been discussed for about 3 years now, and this year really felt like the tipping point for it. Pretty much any organization I talked to is doing something about it, with progress ranging from a launched site, through a budgeted plan, to at least having some executive support.
I was recently asked to provide a list of 5 tips for making Responsive websites fast. I’m usually not a fan of such “top 5” lists, feeling they over-simplify concepts that are quite complex (I definitely spend a good chunk of my time talking about this topic). However, as I wrote the tips it actually felt like 5 was the perfect number for the tips I had in mind, and that they did manage to paint a complete picture.
In the next 3 weeks, I’ll have the luxury of attending four awesome web conferences, two of which – somewhat unfortunately – are named Edge… I would highly recommend attending both conferences, but if you can’t make it, the Edge conferences are also streamed online for free!
Earlier this week I was at a W3C Responsive Images Community Group (RICG) meetup in Paris. It was a great opportunity to connect with smart folks, some of which I’ve never met before, and I had some great conversations, both as part of the agenda and over drinks.
A few weeks ago I tested (again) nearly 500 responsive websites in different resolutions. My test was focused on size differences between resolutions, but looked at the overall page size as a single unit.