Today more people are using their smartphones or tablets to view the web. Is your site mobile friendly? You can check to see if your site mobile friendly, using Google Webmaster Tools.
Since April 2015, Google has been giving mobile search result priority to websites that have mobile versions or responsively designed websites. What this means, is websites that are mobile friendly get listed higher on organic search. Google wants the mobile user to have the best experience possible.
In the past desktop or laptop computers were the only way we viewed the web. Back then websites were designed to be viewed at roughly the same size – desktop.
Now we have tablets and smartphones. Viewing a website designed for a desktop computer on a small smart phone can be a pain; expanding a site to read the text, swiping around to get to a section of the page and trying to click on buttons. To deal with this problem, web developers started making a separate site (or several) for smart phones. That way the smart phone user could navigate through the site with ease.
Technology marches on to “Responsive Design”. Now the trend is to make one version of a website that morphes to accomodate the device it’s being viewed on. It’s a completely different way of designing and is very complex.
To see this in action you can look at this website. If you make the browser window smaller or larger, you will see the layout change.