So you’ve just signed a client that's commissioned you to create a new website. Of course, it's not as simple as desktop these days. So one of your first challenges will be figuring out how to make your design seamless on any screen. That's where choosing between a responsive and adaptive design approach comes in.
Both methods help make the site look and act excellent across different viewports, yet there are significant differences in their workflow—and even end results. This article compares responsive vs adaptive design, examines the use cases for each, and shares practical tips on how to design responsive or adaptive websites, so your next project will look great—no matter which screen it’s on.
Responsive vs adaptive design: what we'll cover
What is responsive design?
Responsive web design is a design approach to creating websites that fluidly adjust to fit any browser or screen they’re viewed in. Responsive websites scale to achieve an optimal fit for the available viewport size. When browsing a responsive website (like this one), you can see how it rearranges its design and content based on how you drag the border of the browser window and resize it.
So on desktop, you might see a three-column layout that fully utilizes the horizontal orientation of the screen, and likewise, a proportionate two-column layout on tablet, and one-column layout on mobile. But no matter what device you will use, you’ll see the same content.
Responsive design is a design that responds to any browser or screen its viewed on.
The concept of responsive design was first introduced in 2010, in Ethan Marcotte’s article “Responsive Web Design”. In it, he correctly anticipated a shift in devices that would be used to access the web and, as a result, proposed a new device-centric way of designing websites.The web design community quickly adopted responsive design approach, and today it's one of the most popular approaches for building new websites.
Responsive websites exist in different styles. If you’re creating a responsive website and looking for inspiration, check out these 15 responsive website design examples.
How to design a responsive website
To create a truly responsive website, a designer must specify key breakpoints for device categories (i.e., desktop, tablet, mobile) and then adjust the design to those breakpoints. Breakpoints are also used as a reference when web designers optimize content. They help designers choose correct dimensions for visual assets like images. The browser will then load the master image and adjust it to the user’s specific screen.
You can also resize images using CSS to make them look perfect on different screens and resolutions. These breakpoints can be defined using CSS media queries or using advanced web creation platforms like Editor X.
When web designers create responsive websites, they rely on responsive measuring units (like percent, viewport height and width, and minimum and maximum values) to ensure that their layout can change across browsers and devices. If you’re interested in learning more about implementing responsive design, check the following step-by-step guide on how to make a responsive website.
Benefits and downsides of responsive web design
Responsive design is by far the most common web design approach. Web designers choose a responsive design because it offers a few significant advantages:
1. Easy to create and maintain.
Responsive design can save designers a lot of time because there’s no need to create a separate layout version for a particular breakpoint. Once you define a layout by setting specific breakpoints, you can use it as a foundation for your website and adjust it to different mediums. Design will automatically adjust to the user screen to offer a good experience.
2. Responsive design accommodates all possible types of screens.
Responsive websites utilize the screen space the viewport offers to arrange content. In responsive design, the layout, sizing and measuring units of UI elements are fluid and relative to the viewer, helping to create a design that seamlessly adjusts to any viewport. As a result, web design is relative to the screen dimensions.
3. Responsive design is better for search engine optimization (SEO).
Responsive design allows a website to show the same content for all devices. Technologies like Flexbox, a CSS web layout model, can auto-stack and wrap the content in containers automatically to prevent content from overlapping and thereby offer users the best possible browsing experience.
However, responsive design has a few downsides too:
1. Responsive websites have complex CSS source code.
Since web designers use the same CSS codebase for all types of devices, the codebase for a responsive website can easily become super complex. That makes it challenging to introduce new CSS styles or modify existing styles without breaking the logic.
2. Longer loading time.
Loading time is a critical metric in web design. The best practice is pretty obvious—provide the best browsing experience by making the loading time as short as possible. But, this can be surprisingly challenging for responsive sites.
When the browser renders a responsive page, it loads all source codebase and, after that, matches the rules applicable for the viewport using the media query. And since the browser has to load all source code, it can negatively impact the loading time. This problem can be particularly noticeable on mobile devices that are generally less powerful than desktop computers.
3. Content needs to be optimized for different screen sizes.
Poor content optimization is not the problem of a responsive design per sé, but rather the content. Designers often start with large viewports such as desktops and then try to scale the design to mobile. At the end of the day, this can cause a bad mobile experience since the content was originally designed for a large viewport.
For example, you will see a desktop website that was shrunk to the size of a mobile screen. To avoid this issue in the first place, web designers should practice mobile first design. Designers should start with the small screens first and then move toward the larger screen sizes.
What is adaptive design?
As the name suggests, adaptive design is a design that adapts to a viewport. With adaptive design, a website snaps into place using static designs that match the current width of the browser.
Aaron Gustafson introduced the concept of adaptive web design in 2011 in his book Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences with Progressive Enhancement. His goal was to teach designers and developers how to create truly accessible, usable, and future-proof websites. However, due to the complexity of the adaptive design approach, only a small fraction of websites created today are adaptive.
How to design an adaptive website
Unlike responsive design, which uses a single website design that rearranges its content to fit each new viewport best, adaptive design uses a different version of a website for each device. This is accomplished by developing a selection of fixed layouts for the most common browser breakpoints: 320, 480, 760, 960, 1200, and 1600 pixels.
In contrast to responsive design, which uses breakpoints to define categories of devices (i.e., desktop, tablet, mobile), in adaptive design, web developers create a tailor-made layout for each of the selected breakpoints. When someone visits an adaptive site, it will choose the corresponding layout from the ones created.
As a result, an adaptive site realistically ends up with 6 different versions of the site: 320 px, 480 px, 760 px, 960 px, 1200 px, and 1600 px. When you open an adaptive site on a desktop and drag the browser window, you will see that the layout stays the same.
Benefits and downsides of adaptive design
The significant benefit of adaptive design is that it allows the creation of a tailored experience for a particular viewport. It can be valuable when you design for a specific screen size and resolution. If you have a static end use, adaptive design requires less code and can therefore be easier to create. For example, adaptive design can be a good option when you create an interactive kiosk for a cafe.
But if you design a website that will be browsed on all possible types of devices, it's better to avoid adaptive design. It has too many downsides:
1. Adaptive design offers less flexibility.
Adaptive web design is limited to a predefined set of screen sizes. The design might look great on each of the viewports that were accounted for in the design, but it doesn't address the in-between sizes of devices and browsers. Considering that it's nearly impossible to define all possible breakpoints, it's easy to face a situation when your design will look bad on a particular device, making this approach outdated for most modern end uses.
2. Adaptive design requires more work than responsive web design.
Adaptive design requires designers to create separate layouts for specific screen sizes. For example, when you design an adaptive website for 6 breakpoints, you must create 6 versions of your design.
3. Higher chance of introducing errors.
Since web developers have to make different versions of a website for each breakpoint, this can make room for error (i.e., introducing content overlap in a particular version of design). With this in mind, adaptive design isn’t super popular among web designers.
How do you tell if a website is responsive or adaptive?
The simplest way to differentiate the two is to see how the website reacts to resizing. A responsive website uses a single fluid layout that changes according to screen size. So you can open a website in your desktop browser and try to resize the browser window.
If you see that the layout changes dynamically, or as you move the cursor, then it means the page is responsive. But if you notice that the website stays static until reaching a particular screen size, you’re dealing with an adaptive website.
Responsive vs adaptive: a detailed comparison
Let’s compare the two approaches using specific properties.
1. Layout
A layout defines the structure of the webpage. In responsive design, the design is relative to the screen dimensions. It means that the layout is fluid and seamlessly adjusts to any viewport.
In adaptive design, designers create a separate layout for each of the selected breakpoints. As a result, an adaptive site ends up with a few different versions of the design. If you have six breakpoints, you will have six separate layouts.
2. Flexibility
Since responsive design isn’t limited to a set number of screen sizes, it can adjust to any viewport. Responsive design can support any screen size and resolution.
With adaptive design, designers create fixed layouts for various screen sizes. It means that the design will look great on each of the viewports that were accounted for in the design. But when the user browses a website using a device with a different screen size or resolution, the site might look odd.
3. SEO
Good web design is SEO-friendly design. And when we talk about responsive vs adaptive design, one of the first things we need to consider is whether a website is optimized for mobile. A website's mobile-friendliness can significantly affect its search engine ranking. According to (study name that you link to), in 2022, more than 60% of all website traffic comes from people using mobile devices. No wonder Google favors responsive design—it offers a better experience for visitors who access it from mobile devices.
That being said, the site loading time is equally important. The more time it takes for a site to load, the higher the chances that users will abandon the site. This is especially true for mobile users who access sites on the go and have a lower tolerance for slow loading time.
That's why it's always important to measure site loading time. Unoptimized responsive websites can have a higher loading time (due to the significant size of CSS source code files that browsers have to load), which can negatively impact SEO. It's recommended to use tools like PageSpeed Insights to identify areas that require optimization.
4. Time and effort
Designers want to create a website that will offer the best possible user experience —but they also want to make it fast and easy. Generally, creating responsive websites takes less time than creating adaptive websites. And there are a lot of responsive web frameworks available on the market, like Bootstrap or Foundation, to help designers define a base layout and adjust the design to different categories of devices.
Adaptive design might give web developers more freedom and personalization, because it allows them to create specific layouts for specific screen sizes. However, the process will require more effort since the team will have to design new layouts for different screen sizes. As a result, the process of creating an adaptive website will take more time and careful validation because there’s more opportunity to make mistakes.
5. User experience
Visitors might not notice any difference between responsive and adaptive design UX when the design works as intended. But that being said,, it's nearly impossible to account for all possible types of devices and screen sizes. They say to expect the unexpected, and when a team practices adaptive design, there will almost aways be a situation when a design won't look great on some screen size/resolution.
That's why it's safer to rely on a responsive design if you want to maximize the chance for a good user experience. Responsive design can look great on any screen and resolution, giving designers a better chance of creating a great user experience for various groups of users.
Responsive vs adaptive design: how to decide between two
When designers build a website, they want to offer an excellent experience for all groups of users, no matter what devices they use to access the site. Both responsive and adaptive web design can help achieve this goal, but they have a lot of differences. Due to its fluidity and flexibility, responsive design has now become the widespread norm, and most new websites created today are responsive.
At the same time, if your goal is to create a website only for specific viewports (like a kiosk), go for adaptive design because it allows you to offer a tailored experience for this medium. For building responsive websites for any viewport, try out Editor X.
