Netmums has relaunched its parenting advice portal with a responsively designed site, which has been designed in-house over the past nine months, at a cost of over £100,000.

The decision follows a surge in mobile traffic – in March 2014, smartphones accounted for 51 per cent of views on the site, while tablets made up a further 20 per cent. Two years earliers, those figures stood at 27 per cent and eight per cent respectively. This has driven an overall explosion in traffic, with monthly visits to the site rising from 5.5m in March 2012 to nearly 12m in 2014.

Netmums expects the responsive site to increase overall traffic by around 20 per cent.

“We believe a move to responsive design is the only way sites will survive and thrive. In 2010, Morgan Stanley predicted mobile users would surpass desktop within five years but, as our members are mostly young parents ahead of the technology curve, we’ve seen it happen far faster,” said Netmums founder Siobhan Freegard.

“There’s no doubt a significantly large part of our growth is down to the huge take-up of smartphones and tablets by our readership. The mums – and dads – who read our site lead such busy lives and want a seamless way to view us with no navigation difficulties or confused designs on different platforms.”

The relaunch is also intended to make booking easier for advertisers, as they can now book one cross-platform campaign a for set number of impressions, without requiring separate mobile and desktop campaigns. Netmums currently doesnt use a responsive ad server, but Freegard told Mobile Marketing “it will be in time. Clients instead provide all formats and the site then selects the right one depending on how it is being viewed.”