Responsive Design

Responsive design is an approach to web page creation that flows the page layout to fit the visitor’s screen size and orientation, and changes the layout accordingly. The Magento default responsive theme features style sheets that support flexibility for layouts and images, and helps provide a pleasing experience for site visitors using mobile devices. By comparison, non-responsive sites or sites not optimized for smaller screens or mobile devices are often slow or difficult to read, and offer a clunky experience on mobile devices.

Responsive Theme on Tablet and Smartphone

Benefits of using the Magento default responsive theme include:

• You can get a tablet and smart phone friendly responsive site in about half the time as before, speeding time to market and freeing up resources for other projects.
• Your responsive site makes you better able to participate in the fast growing mobile commerce space, and gives you the ability to create a website that is more easily adapted to new opportunities and less expensive to maintain. A responsive site also offers potential search engine optimization (SEO) benefits from using Google’s preferred approach to mobile-optimizing sites.
• You no longer need to develop separate content per device. The default theme is easy to customize for simple sites, and provides a powerful starting point for developing themes for more complex sites.

To learn more about creating custom responsive themes, see the Responsive Theme Developer's Guide.