Mobile friendly or responsive websites play a great role in delivering positive user experience along with ortant to design a website with a responsive approach. This makes it easy to adjust to all screen sizes it is being viewed at.
A mobile-friendly business website or a retail store is designed and coded on responsive layouts that are compatible with all web browsers. In order to avoid later regret, it is advised to test the site for responsiveness at every step of the development process. For an efficient end result, there are several tools which can be used for testing the adjustability of responsive layouts. Some of them available for free include:
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XRespond
XRespond is a virtual device lab app that allows a web developer to preview his under development website under various device screens. It works in a horizontal style with a long appearance. To view your design to the fullest in all screen formats, you need to scroll it sideways. There is a label on each screen that tells the exact size and device it matches to. With a dropdown menu, you can adjust the height and width settings as per your need.
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Responsinator
Responsinator is a similar responsive layout testing application that uses a horizontal scroll bar which is used for viewing a website in a vertical column. You need to scroll down to preview your website on various screen sizes and devices. The devices available in it includes iPhones and Android phones with portrait and landscape views. To avoid SSL errors, it automatically includes and matches the HTTP and HTTPS of a website domain.
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Google Mobile Test
Google has generated its own tool for webmasters to test mobile-friendly feature of a website. Unlike the two tools discussed above, this tool is not a previewer and doesn’t spot the user interface bugs. In contrast, it is a dedicated mobile tool that is responsible for identifying the responsiveness issues within your site. When you start a test, the result will be either pass or fail. It is not considered a complete resource for responsive testing but offers accurate results.
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Responsive Design Checker
If you want a quick yet efficient mobile-friendly test for your website, then responsive design checker is the tool to go with. It is specifically crafted for custom screen sizes. To start with, just enter the URL and you’ll have a full control over the responsive testing space. Depending on the screen size you want to test upon, alter the width and height as per your requirement. With its aspect ratio tool, it automatically picks up the suitable height in case you altered the width. The advantage it offers over other tools is that this platform picks up even large screen sizes of desktops of around 24” wide.
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Matt Kersley’s Responsive Tool
Matt Kersley is a well-known designer and developer who released his own free tool for testing the efficiency of responsive layouts. It is a plain site previewer supporting screen sizes of fixed widths, such as 240px, 320px, 480px, 768px, 1024px. The preview panes feature scroll bars to allow you to move through the content without any clutter issues.
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Designmodo Responsive Test
Designmodo Responsive Test is a tool designed by Designmodo which is quite easy to use. This free tool allows web developers to preview a site in a single browser for all certain screen widths. The key feature it offers is grid-based page setup. To ensure responsive nature, you can check your each and every webpage for pixel points using this web application. It consists of predefined device widths which can be dragged to preview pane to fit the screen widths you want to test the responsiveness of your site. You can even enter custom width and height.
So, these are few free yet accurate testing tools which are used to test the mobile-friendly feature of a website. If you are looking to get a highly responsive WordPress website for your business, feel free to consult our web developers at Citrus Studio in Mississauga.
