As a web designer, the last thing you want after spending untold hours building out a site that looks great on your screen is for it to look glitchy on someone else’s. (And with the number of devices there are in the market lately, your site is pretty much guaranteed to show up on some unexpected screen sizes.)
In this day and age, a responsive web design approach that ensures that websites behave well on a variety of screen sizes and resolutions is pretty much table stakes.
With that in mind, we’re sharing a curated collection of responsive websites from a variety of sectors. Each responsive website example on our list uses a particular creative strategy, like flexible grids, multiple columns and zigzag layouts, to make sure their design can be viewed quickly on any device. But before we dive into the examples, let’s answer a few popular questions about responsive design.
What is a responsive website page?
A responsive website page is a page that adjusts its layout and content based on the size of a viewport. A responsive web page looks equally good on a small screen of a mobile device and on a large TV screen.
20 responsive website examples
01. Maya Lynne Adar
Maya Lynne Adar is a multidisciplinary designer whose website uses unconventional typography that combines an italicized serif with a sans-serif font. The site additionally features cutout shapes that pop in and out of the screen and a dice-like mechanism (built with custom CSS) that allows visitors to toggle between various color palettes. Animations, website hover effects and horizontal scroll further add an element of playfulness and surprise.
Maya Lynne Adar accounts for the fact that less is more on smaller screens, striving for elegance in simplicity. The minimalist layout presents the artist's work across several menus—a testament to the importance of having a strong information hierarchy when it comes to creating an intuitive UI. The mobile view, however, does away with the horizontal scrolling altogether in favor of a card-like format that presents the different tabs in Adar’s menu. The layout therefore offers a much lighter experience, not only because of the limitations of mobile interactions but because less heavy sites load quicker.
02. Ethical Essence
Ethical Essence’s eCommerce website stands out for its strong branded touches: earthy tones, high-definition videos, sans-serif typeface and well-lit product photography. The company emphasizes these nature-themed visuals, showcasing eco-friendly skincare products against a backdrop of sudsy beach waves and rocky terrain.
As a whole, the site is gorgeously responsive, with all the elements adjusting well with the breakpoints. That’s all to say, you won’t notice much of a difference on any screen size because the website is formatted to shrink and expand accordingly. One way Ethical Essence achieves this is by changing their product gallery to display just one product at a time on mobile (rather than the row of four products on computer screen sizes), intentionally keeping the product image front and center while displaying related products on a slider. The takeaway: give assets room to breathe, even if they can’t share the width of the mobile page.
03. The Boathouse Agency
The Boathouse Agency's website exudes coolness and creativity, with meticulous attention to detail. The website glides gracefully when scrolling. The combination of videos, animations and unique scroll behaviors creates a non-traditional experience—a perfect complement to a portfolio that showcases innovative design projects and celeb collaborations. Notice how the logo plays well on all sections because it changes based on what’s behind it, keeping the agency’s branding neutral and letting their work do the talking.
The mobile version of the site offers a more simplified experience. You’re likely not used to being greeted with a video on a handheld device, which immediately sets the brand apart. After that, you’re presented with a scrollable listview of different case studies. It’s all kept neat, tidy and professional on mobile view, with a look and feel that spotlights some of the incredible clients in The Boathouse Agency’s portfolio.
04. Kristina Horan Website Designs
Kristina Horan Website Designs (KHWD) site is bold from the jump, with sharp contrasting colors that add some pop to the daring grayscale image at the top of the site. The website has an eclectic look and feel as you scroll, using various scroll behaviors, buttons and blurred images that add flair..
The website is arguably even more impactful on mobile, with the same scroll behaviors presented in a tighter area so that there’s something eye-catching at every portion of the scroll. In the header, KHWD tucks the menu behind a hamburger menu (likely to reduce cognitive load), which draws further attention to the striking image on the landing page. It’s all carefully crafted, so take note of how well the header image scales, the flow of information presented and the scroll-friendliness of the website.
05. La Bonne
La Bonne is an organizer of corporate events, experiential marketing campaigns and social gatherings with a website that matches the team’s “good vibes” approach. Upon entering the site, you’re greeted by a collage on each end of the screen. The collage fades on scroll to reveal additional design elements that explain what the company is all about.
The site is optimized for mobile screens, with reasonably sized, centered text. The website features contrasting colors and a simple flow of information from top to bottom. The button to submit your contact information is illustrated as an envelope, adding an endearing touch that sets the tone for the relationship from the very beginning.
06. VMV Studio
VMV Studio is a self-described collective of designers, filmmakers and visionaries whose website reflects the studio's innovative approach to visual storytelling. Animations, bold graphis and videos breathe life into the web design, showcasing the studio's creativity and technical prowess. Meanwhile, subtle touches—like the frosted glass footer and text fill on scroll—add extra flair.
The same holds true on phones; all the same assets make a comeback without slowing down the website’s load time. You’ll see the same scroll effects, the same high-quality videos and all of the same pages on mobile. It speaks to the fact that you don’t have to dumb down the mobile view of your website when you use Wix Studio. On mobile view, the item grid that features the VMV Studio’s portfolio of work shifts from a looser collection of one to two items per row, to a strict single item per row format that makes the website more scroll-friendly.
07. Velocity X
Velocity X leverages mouse hover effects that move the objects in the background, combined with unexpected horizontal scrolling. Blurry shapes, glowing outlines and glass-morphic menus compliment their cutting-edge branding. The recurring use of purple, orange and turquoise hues offers visual cohesion through a branded color palette, and an FAQ menu at the bottom adds further context to the brand’s offering.
Velocity X maintains its look and feel on the mobile website, the major difference being the resizing of elements and the manual horizontal scroll (done intentionally to preserve the experience). Card menus no longer stack. They’re instead presented as a list view of cards, which is all to say that the mobile website does away with animations to simplify the experience, while still upholding the brand’s visual identity on smaller screens.
08. Moon Rabbit Acupuncture
Moon Rabbit Acupuncture's website features high-resolution images, a light color palette, hover effects and a thin typeface to draw attention to the main focus of their website: the benefits of acupuncture and holistic healing. Overlayed menus and product shots invite visitors to explore their various offerings, from booking a service, to shopping their products.
The first thing you’ll notice when viewing the site on mobile is how well images scale down to accommodate narrower screen sizes. Scroll on and you’ll notice that the various grids of assets change so fewer elements clutter the screen per row.
09. Visual Identity Co.
Visual Identity's website showcases a striking animated visual right as you enter the landing page. The animation toggles between a gold or purple color at the click of a button. Below, scroll effects like text fill and resizing elements give the website a sense of flow within the movement. The portfolio highlights a diverse range of projects, demonstrating the agency's ability to create impactful visual identities for clients.
Not much changes on mobile, which is a sign of a highly responsive website. Whereas some mobile websites opt out of animated effects, Visual Identity preserves all of the same elements (including a clock that displays the current time in the agency’s hometown of India) that make its desktop version so effective.
10. Scopetheory
Scopetheory keeps their site simple above the fold, using a blank white canvas for a background, a custom typeface and a pared-down navigation menu. As you scroll, things start getting interesting: the brand’s client work is presented in a grid which starts to stack up as you travel further down the website.
On mobile, the approach is somewhat different; you no longer need to scroll down to be greeted with visuals. Rather, they appear above the fold. The stacking effect still stands though, as does the chat function. An interesting note: Scopetheory brought the "client impact" section up higher on mobile (perhaps to adjust to different expected behaviors between mobile and desktop, or else to emphasize the most important elements first).
11. Esperia Advocacy
Esperia Advocacy adds subtle design touches that set its site apart from other company sites in the space: architectural imagery, a mix of italicized and serif professional fonts, an eggshell background and an oversized, halfway-cut-off footer.
It all translates quite well on mobile. The company doesn’t remove anything from the mobile site, opting to maintain the same appearance on all devices. Here, the assets have a little more room to breathe, which makes for a more scrollable experience overall.
12. Product Hiring House
Product Hiring House's website combines multiple effects for a memorable experience. These effects include a sticky header, items that move on scroll (like the venn diagram that squeezes the two circles closer together), hover effects and sliding image galleries. When paired with a rich paper background, a glassmorphic effect and gorgeous landscape photography, you get a website loaded with texture and engaging functionality.
The same holds true on mobile - though it’s all resized. The grid takes on a more vertical alignment here, though the animation effects are preserved. It makes for a seamlessly responsive website that feels similar across all touchpoints.
13. KlikArch
KlikArch's website greets you with a bold sans-serif font that tells you a little about what the brand does. However, it’s only when you scroll below the fold that you see their work in action. Their header disappears into the top of the screen as you scroll down, revealing product images and team headshots that decorate the screen instead.
Transitioning the site to mobile affords more whitespace when you first land, though as you scroll you’ll find that the contents end up taking most of the space. It’s an interesting play on dimensionality when resizing the website.
14. Strategy Folk
Strategy Folk's website is clean and minimalistic on entry, with a little robot animation that runs across the screen. As you scroll, design assets like text boxes, buttons, cards and more robot animations spring on screen to add movement and excitement. You’ll notice a lot of whitespace on the website, which helps it scale down effectively on mobile, as well as an example of a custom cursor that activates over one specific section.
On mobile, the elements appear tighter together, indicating that you can scroll below the fold to see more. That said, everything behaves relatively the same as on the desktop site, providing a cohesive experience across all screen sizes.
15. Change the Game Studio
Change the Game Studio's hyper-colorful site is a perfect representation of their ethos: chaotic innovation. Oversized text, unique fonts and maximalist style help the brand go against the grain, and abstract shapes, graphics, patterns and typographies add an extra pop.
The same look and feel is maintained on mobile, with a resized grid that’s more scroll-friendly. The menu is a bit tighter, but they’ve chosen not to use a burger menu in place of displaying the full list of options up front. It’s as visual as it is conceptual: see for yourself!
16. Praagya
Praagya's portfolio website leverages hover display effects against a tv static backdrop to achieve a bold and differentiated aesthetic. Sharp visual and conceptual design lays the groundwork for his portfolio, which merges print, image making and strong use of creative hover interactions. For static homepages like this one, you have to pay meticulous attention to detail and spotlight the work itself.
Switch over to a mobile view of this website to see how brilliantly responsive this website truly is. All the hover displays run automatically, but the website is perfectly spaced to fit them all accordingly. It demonstrates the power of playing to your device’s interactions to shape the experience of the web design itself.
17. Aura Studios
Aura Studios' showcases simple grid layouts that lets the content do the talking: rich photographs of gorgeous travel destinations and epic getaways. It’s a creative agency that wields a strong sense of elegance in simplicity on its homepage. The brand exudes lavishness, from its rich earth-toned color palette, to aspirational imagery and snippets of punchy typography.
The site responds well to narrower dimensions too, with a nearly identical mobile experience just with tighter shots of the same images used for desktop. While the text scales to two lines for more breathing room, the proportions of all other assets are kept the same.
18. The Forestta
The Forestta's features several scroll effects against a leafy green background, including parallax images, side scrolling text and cards that overlay on top of one another. It’s a fun design that showcases some of the delicious food you can expect to find there, with a color palette that perfectly complements the images the brand chose.
On mobile the same site behaviors are maintained, with the grid shrinking down to single content per row. In all instances, the website prioritizes usability with clear CTAs to book a table, order online and check out the menu.
19. The Benev
The first thing you’ll notice upon entering The Benev's website is the custom ‘B’ shaped cursor, which appears as the rest of the website loads. From there, slightly washed-out videos and imagery give an ethereal touch to the website’s branding. All the content is laid out in a dynamic, non-modular grid that fills the page in an unexpected way.
On your phone, the grid snaps into a modular shape, reducing the amount of visual stimulus that would otherwise be there if the grid were simply shrunken down instead. It's one of the best responsive website examples to demonstrates how blocks of content can scale well across various screen sizes.
20. YNK
Young Na Kim (YNK) combines text and image scroll effects to give a bold landing page some extra dynamism. The focus of the website is clear: to showcase the selected portfolio pieces in a section below the fold, incentivizing people to get in touch.
Resized on mobile, the website behaves exactly the same, now with a little more whitespace. Square images turn to circles as you scroll, and moving text also combines to give the experience an added sense of dimensionality.
Why should websites use responsive design?
Almost 60% of website traffic in 2023 came from mobile devices, so it's essential to optimize your sites for small mobile screens in addition to standard desktop. Responsive design allows a single website to be optimized for all devices, rather than maintaining separate websites for desktop, tablets and mobile.
Where can I find responsive website templates?
Creating a responsive website from scratch can be challenging because you have to arrange site information for each device it might be viewed on. A website template can thereby be a real time-saver, offering a ready-to-use solution that you can still fine-tune and customize.
Wix Studio offers an excellent collection of responsive website templates that feature unique visual attributes, such as crisp typography and well-crafted animated effects.
So how do you make a great responsive website?
The first thing that you need to do is to learn the principles of good website design. Those principles are universal and apply to any type of website. After that, you can dive into the specifics of responsive design.
Maintaining a flexible website layout is critical for designing responsive websites because it allows you to edit your existing designs instead of recreating them from scratch. Use Wix Studio’s responsive AI as a starting point to shave off hours spent on adjusting your layout and the corresponding elements by hand (you can always set custom breakpoints or make design adjustments afterward).
From there, consider other web design standards to smooth out user experience across all screen sizes. This includes taking a mobile-first approach; designing for thumb, touchpad and mouse interactions; creating websites with a singular call to action to reduce friction; and using fluid layouts by default (including designing with percentages rather than pixels and using SVG images that scale well).
As a generality, a minimalistic design enables your website to scale effectively without running into loading issues or interaction errors.
Check out this guide on how to make a responsive website for the full rundown on responsive design.
What makes a website responsive vs. non-responsive?
Responsive websites scale up and down automatically to respond to the size of your browser. That means that whether you shrink the browser on your desktop by holding and dragging your mouse, or switching to view a website on a tablet or phone instead, you’ll get a similar experience retro-fitted to the device you’re on.
Responsive websites:
Faster page load speeds
Increase your conversion rates
Provide better user experiences
Strengthen your SEO performance
Keep mobile device users more engaged
Decrease bounce rates because of faster load times
Future-proof your website to stay ahead of the curve
Reduce maintenance costs of having multiple sites with responsive design
Making websites responsive is a best practice among agencies to ensure a seamless, unified experience across all breakpoints. If you don’t do this for client sites, your clients’ users will likely need to pinch and zoom to navigate the website because it will display a desktop-friendly design on mobile, or, more realistically, your visitors will bounce.
Best practices for creating a responsive website
Practice mobile-first design. Start your design process with the smallest screen size in mind. It will help you identify and prioritize the most important content for your web page. That’s different of course than when you actually build out your website on Wix Studio (since you should build from desktop screen size down), but the actual design process should start with mobile because most users visit sites online in their phones.
Set media queries. CSS media queries define different screen sizes and make a web page adapt its layout to different screen sizes. Among media queries, a category of breakpoints defines the widths of devices. Commonly used breakpoints are mobile (480px), tablet (481px - 7689px), desktop (779px - 1024px) and TV screens (201px+).
Optimize images. You need to make sure that the images you use are optimized for different devices, so they look great and load quickly no matter where a user comes across them. That’s where image optimization comes in—it’s the process of resizing images for different viewports. This helps to reduce page load time and improve the site's performance (especially on mobile devices).
Test your design on multiple devices. You have to test your website on various devices to ensure it looks good and functions properly on different screen sizes and resolutions.
Contextualize the aesthetic to different screen sizes: your mobile view shouldn’t be a 1:1 clone of your desktop website. Rather, you should adjust the design accordingly.
