Responsive Design vs. Adaptive Design: What’s the Best Choice for Designers?

Introduction:

Google has always advocated responsive web design (RWD), particularly since a significant change on April 21, 2015, which gave mobile-friendly websites a higher ranking. However, the update does not mandate that you use responsive design; it only requires that a site be mobile-friendly, with good UX and performance. Since the advent of mobile, one of the major arguments we've heard is whether to create a discrete mobile site or a responsive, adaptive web design (AWD). We won't address standalone mobile sites for the time being because they require separate creation, making them the least popular option for designers and businesses.

What’s the Difference between Adaptive and Responsive Design?

Simply put, responsive is smooth and adjusts to the screen's size regardless of the target xdevice. Only one of these CSS media queries is required for a responsive website to adjust to different screen sizes. Responsive uses them to change styles based on the target device, such as the display type, width, height, etc. Contrarily, adaptive design makes use of static layouts based on breakpoints that remain inactive after being loaded.Adaptive sites are those that can detect the screen size and load the proper layout for it. Typically, you would develop an adaptive site for the following six popular screen widths:

320

480

760

960

1200

1600.

Creating layouts for a minimum of six widths makes it seem like adaptive layouts take more time. But responsiveness can be trickier because a media query used incorrectly (or not at all) might lead to display and performance problems.The latter in particular has generated a lot of criticism in recent years because many websites still give the complete desktop experience, which, even if it doesn't run on a mobile device, significantly slows down websites. You can use media queries to get around this, but there will be some compromises since a responsive site will never be as quick as a dedicated mobile site.

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