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If your website doesn’t perform well on mobile, you could be losing potential customers. But here’s the good news: Elementor, one of the most popular website builders for WordPress, offers powerful tools to make creating responsive websites easier and more intuitive. In this blog post, we’ll cover 10 essential rules for building a fully responsive website using Elementor.
1. Start Mobile-First
One of the most effective approaches to responsive web design is to design “mobile-first.” This means creating layouts that work for smaller screens first and then enhancing them for larger screens. Why start with mobile? Simply put, it forces you to prioritize the most important content, streamline your design, and avoid clutter.
In Elementor, you can easily switch to mobile view by selecting the mobile icon in the editor’s responsive mode. From there, design the layout for mobile, tablet, and finally, desktop.
Why Mobile-First?
A mobile-first approach ensures your website provides a great experience for users on any device. It forces you to focus on the essentials, which improves user experience.You can expand the design as the screen size increases, rather than trying to shrink a desktop design.
2. Use Elementor’s Responsive-Ready Kits
Elementor provides a variety of responsive-ready kits and templates, designed with flexibility in mind. These kits are already optimized for different screen sizes, giving you a strong foundation and saving you hours of design time.
Responsive kits are a great choice if you want to speed up your design process without sacrificing quality. They provide a professional look and ensure that the key elements of your website work beautifully on every screen.
Benefits of Responsive Kits:
They’re pre-designed for optimal performance on all devices.You can still customize each element, but with a reliable starting point.
3. Add Breakpoints for Customization
Breakpoints are essential for responsive design, as they define the points at which your layout adapts to different screen sizes. Elementor’s default breakpoints cover desktop, tablet, and mobile, but Elementor Pro users can add custom breakpoints for even finer control.
To adjust breakpoints in Elementor:
Go to “Site Settings” and select the “Layout” tab.
Expand the “Breakpoints” section and add additional sizes or orientations as needed.
With custom breakpoints, you can tailor your layout for more specific devices, ensuring a better experience for every user.
Benefits of Additional Breakpoints:
Optimize layout for specific devices and orientations.
Gain control over how each element adapts to a variety of screen sizes.
4. Use Fluid Units for Flexibility
Responsive design isn’t just about pixels. Fluid layouts adapt to the size of the screen, making your website more flexible and scalable. Elementor lets you use various units besides pixels, including percentages (%), viewport height (vh), viewport width (vw), em, and rem.
Common Unit Options:
% (Percentage): Useful for flexible widths, such as containers that take up 90% of the viewport width, leaving space on either side.
vh/vw (Viewport Height/Width): Perfect for elements that need to take up a full screen, like hero sections.
em/rem (Relative Units): Great for text, where sizes can scale relative to the parent or root element, ensuring readability across devices.
Fluid units allow you to design layouts that look great on all screens without needing to tweak each device manually.
5. Set Scalable Typography
Typography is often overlooked in responsive design, yet it’s crucial for readability. Elementor allows you to set font sizes in scalable units, like em or rem, which adjust based on the screen size.
How to Use Scalable Typography:
Go to “Typography” settings in Elementor.
Choose em or rem units for font size, line height, and spacing.
Set a base font size in global settings to ensure consistency.
Using scalable typography ensures that your text remains legible on all devices without you having to manually adjust every screen size.
6. Optimize Images for Devices
Images can significantly impact load times, especially on mobile devices with slower internet connections. Elementor offers a powerful tool to address this issue: the Image Optimizer plugin.
Why Optimize Images?
Optimizing images means reducing the file size of the visuals. This helps to improve site speed on mobile devices and rank higher on search engines.
Using Elementor’s Image Optimizer plugin: you can bulk upload your images to the media library and enable optimization. Your images are then automatically converted to WebP and AVIF formats. These new generation image formats are significantly lighter than jpeg and PNG and maintain high quality visuals in small file sizes.
Additionally in Elementor editor you can add custom background images for each device.
For background images, Elementor allows you to set different images or crop sizes for desktop, tablet, and mobile. This flexibility is essential for maintaining a high-quality, fast-loading website across devices.
Let’s say you have a gorgeous background image for your hero section, but on mobile, the focus of the image is lost along with the color contrast of the text on top.
The solution is you can either set a different background image that is vertical by nature,
or you can still use the same image but change the display size and the position to keep your visual focal point right where you want on mobile.
Create a better user experience with visually-appropriate layouts for different devices.
7. Make Interactive Elements Tap-Friendly
Responsive design isn’t only about how things look; it’s also about functionality. Interactive elements like buttons and links must be tap-friendly, especially on mobile devices. The recommended minimum size for touch targets is 44×44 pixels, which ensures they’re easy to tap.
With Elementor, you can easily increase button size and spacing:
Go to “Button” settings and adjust the padding for additional tappable space.
Use Elementor’s “Floating Button” widget for contact buttons that are easy to access on mobile.
This improves accessibility and ensures users don’t have to struggle to interact with your website on smaller screens.
8. Hide Unnecessary Elements on Mobile
Not all content is necessary on every device. For example, a large background video or complex animation might look fantastic on desktop but could slow down your website or make it harder to navigate on mobile.
Elementor’s “Show/Hide” feature lets you control which elements appear on desktop, tablet, and mobile. To hide an element:
Go to the “Advanced” tab for any widget or section.
Toggle visibility under “Responsive” settings.
This feature helps you create clean, streamlined layouts on mobile without compromising the desktop experience.
9. Apply Motion Effects Mindfully
Motion effects and entrance animations can add flair to your website, but they need to be used thoughtfully on mobile devices. Too much movement can overwhelm mobile users and slow down loading times.
In Elementor, you can control the motion effects for each device individually:
Select the element you want to animate.
Go to the “Advanced” settings and customize effects under “Motion Effects.”
By selectively applying animations, you ensure your website remains dynamic without compromising mobile performance.
10. Optimize Load Times with Lazy Loading
Load time is critical, especially on mobile devices where users expect fast performance. Elementor supports lazy loading, a technique that delays the loading of images and other resources until they’re needed.
How to Enable Lazy Loading:
Go to Elementor’s performance settings.
Enable lazy loading for images and videos.
Lazy loading improves site speed, which enhances user experience and can also positively impact SEO. With this final step, you’re ready to provide a seamless, responsive experience on any device.
Start Building Your Responsive Website Today!
Building a responsive website doesn’t have to be complicated. With Elementor’s robust set of tools, from responsive-ready kits and customizable breakpoints to tap-friendly interactive elements and image optimization, you have everything you need to create a website that looks and performs beautifully on any screen.
Start building your responsive website with Elementor today and deliver a seamless experience on every device. By following these 10 essential rules, you’ll ensure your website is responsive-ready from the start.
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