Ensuring your site is fully responsive is no longer just a ‘nice-to-have’ – fail to do so and you’ll likely scare potential customers away! With over 60% of web traffic coming from mobile devices, the importance of delivering a great experience across all screen sizes is on par with producing a quality product range. So, what’s the best way for Divi designers to achieve this?

Native Divi offers some super built-in responsive features, although users often encounter challenges that can lead to what we call a ‘responsive design debt’. This includes limited control over column behavior at custom breakpoints, inconsistent spacing and typography scaling. Adapting menus and dynamic content for various devices can add further complexities, so creatives should consider dedicated third-party solutions that improve the process from start to finish.

In this article, we’ll guide you through the nuances of Divi’s responsive design capabilities, so you can use Divi’s default settings and responsive preview system effectively. We’ll share best practices tailored for Divi web designers and introduce you to Divi Life’s suite of layouts and plugins designed with full responsiveness in mind, helping you eliminate that design debt once and for all!

What you’ll learn in this article:

• Why a responsive design is crucial for user experience and potential sales.
• A review of Divi’s built-in responsive features and challenges ambitious designers face.
• Guidance on Divi’s responsive preview system and settings for tailored adjustments across devices.
• A look at third-party solutions from Divi Life, which provide greater customizations, responsiveness, and efficiencies.
• Key techniques for effective responsive design.

Understanding Divi’s responsive preview system and responsive settings

Divi equips users with two essential tools for crafting mobile-friendly websites – the responsive preview system and responsive settings. 

The preview system allows designers to test layouts across various devices, ensuring that designs adapt to different screen sizes without so much as a whimper. Meanwhile, responsive settings enable precise device-specific customization, allowing for tailored adjustments in fonts, spacing, and visibility.

How to use Divi’s responsive preview in the Visual Builder

Begin by enabling the Visual Builder on your desired page. When working on the front end, click the purple ellipsis at the bottom center of the screen:

Next, select the device icons located in the bottom left corner to activate the responsive preview:

You can switch between page-level and module-level previews. The module-level preview allows you to view specific modules in tablet or phone mode by clicking into a module’s settings, navigating to the Design tab, and hovering over the desired option (see below for more detail).

Divi also offers device-specific preview modes with exact dimensions for popular phones and tablets, ensuring your designs are accurately represented. The above-the-fold indicator adapts to each device preview, helping you optimize crucial content placement. You can also test portrait and landscape orientations with automatic content reflow, ensuring your designs look great regardless of how users hold their devices.

How to use Divi’s responsive settings in the editor 

Using Divi’s responsive settings in the editor is easy! To begin, click on the gear icon of any element you want to customize. Navigate to the Design tab, and any functions with responsive control options will have a mobile phone icon next to them. 

Click on this icon and you’ll be able to make any device-specific adjustments.

Divi allows customization for fonts, spacing, layouts, and visibility on desktop, tablet, and phone views. Its intelligent inheritance system means that settings cascade from larger to smaller devices unless explicitly overridden. This feature ensures that if no value is specified for smaller devices, it automatically inherits from larger ones.

Element-level responsive controls are also available for sections, rows, columns, and modules. With Divi 5 looming on the horizon, some major changes are afoot, and current responsive tabs will be removed – changes made while viewing a specific device will be automatically applied across all relevant breakpoints.

Other native Divi tools that help with responsive design

Mastering Divi’s native tools will significantly improve your ability to perfect responsive design. These features allow for streamlined adjustments and global controls, so your designs maintain consistency across various devices. Below, we’ll outline key native Divi tools, how to access them, and their functionality, providing a brief overview to get you started.

The Mobile Customizer

The Mobile Customizer is a mighty feature that extends Divi’s responsive capabilities through global controls. To access it, navigate to the WordPress dashboard, then select Divi > Theme Customizer. Here, you’ll find options specifically tailored for mobile devices.

With the Mobile Customizer, you can adjust default section heights and row spacing across breakpoints to ensure optimal layout on smaller screens. Additionally, you can set baseline body and header text sizing for mobile devices, allowing for a more readable experience.

This fab tool also enables you to override module-level settings with site-wide mobile adjustments, control mobile menu behavior and styling, and define custom breakpoint behavior for mobile-specific layouts. Groovy, huh? Making such adjustments can help you create a cohesive and user-friendly mobile experience without breaking a sweat.

SRCSET support for responsive images

Divi’s automatic image optimization system includes robust SRCSET support for responsive images. This feature dynamically generates images in multiple sizes – 2048px, 1536px, 1080px, 980px, 768px, and 480px widths – ensuring that users receive appropriately-sized images based on their device screen width.

By automatically delivering the best-suited image size, Divi enhances loading times and overall performance on mobile devices. Background image optimization is available for sections and modules, ensuring that all visual elements are crisp and clear regardless of the device used.

Divi also supports lazy loading, which improves mobile performance by delaying the loading of off-screen images until they are needed. Furthermore, it offers WebP format support for modern browsers, allowing for even greater compression without sacrificing quality.

Global presets

Global presets in Divi allow you to streamline your responsive design process through preset controls. By defining responsive settings once and applying them site-wide, you can maintain consistent spacing and typography across breakpoints effortlessly. 

These presets enable you to set device-specific display rules through preset inheritance, ensuring that changes made at one level automatically reflect throughout similar elements. You can also create responsive-ready module templates that simplify future design efforts.

You can access and save presets by selecting the preset option beneath the module title:

If you’ve saved any global presets related to that particular module, you’ll find them here. You can also add new presets to the list using the same method.

What’s more, global presets synchronize responsive behavior across similar elements, making it easier to manage large-scale projects or multiple client sites while ensuring a uniform look and feel across all devices. This approach saves time and reduces the chances of inconsistencies in your designs.

Professional techniques for bulletproof responsive design

For Divi designers looking to polish their responsive design skills, mastering advanced techniques is a must. These professional-grade solutions address complex layout challenges while complementing Divi’s native responsive features. By implementing these methods, you can overcome limitations and create professional, adaptable designs. Here, we’ll explore key techniques and where you can find the necessary settings within the builder, along with practical examples to guide your implementation.

Give your designs breathing space with margins, padding, and line height

Effective spacing is necessary for responsive layouts, and Divi offers some super tools to manage those gaps. Start by implementing dynamic spacing calculations using Divi’s responsive controls. Access these settings by clicking on the gear icon of a section, row, or module, then navigate to the Design tab where you can adjust margins and padding for each device.

To ensure consistent scaling across breakpoints, configure spacing inheritance by setting values at larger breakpoints that automatically cascade down to smaller ones. Using relative units like percentages or EMs for margins and padding can help maintain proportional spacing as screen sizes change.

Additionally, setting optimal line-height ratios for different device widths is vital for readability, as Jennifer Rodriguez, Lead Developer at Divi Life, notes: 

“Aim for a line height of 1.5 times the font size on desktop, and consider slightly tighter spacing on mobile devices to enhance readability. Proper spacing can significantly influence user experience; it’s essential to give your content room to breathe! Ensure that your text lines are limited to about 60-80 characters for optimal readability, and select clean, legible typefaces that are easy on the eyes. Well-structured layouts with adequate white space invites users to engage with your content and stay on your site for longer.”

Use VW and VH units when possible

Viewport-relative units such as Viewport Width (VW) and Viewport Height (VH) are impressive tools for creating fluid layouts in Divi. To implement these advanced techniques effectively, combine VW/VH units with the CSS calc() function for sophisticated scaling. This allows you to create more dynamic designs that adapt to various screen sizes.

For example, you can apply this CSS variable technique:

This approach enables you to create responsive elements that adjust based on both the width and height of the viewport, and the variables can be adapted to match your design preferences.

In Divi’s custom CSS fields, you can strategically apply viewport units to key elements like font sizes or container widths. This method improves responsiveness and helps establish a fluid typography system where text scales proportionally with screen size. Use VW and VH units the right way, and you can ensure that your designs maintain visual harmony across devices. 

Keep layouts simple when it comes to columns

Managing complex column layouts in Divi can be a challenge for anyone, but simplicity is key to achieving effective responsive designs. 

Start by implementing progressive column reduction across breakpoints. This means adjusting the number of columns displayed as the screen size decreases, ensuring that content remains accessible and appealing on the eye.

So we’ve selected a four-column row on desktop:

To adjust column widths for different devices, navigate to the Advanced tab in the column settings. Go to Custom CSS > Module Elements > Main Element. You can then select the mobile icon to set widths for different devices:

• Desktop: Leave as is (e.g. 25% for four columns).
• Tablet: Click on the responsive icon for tablet and enter the following snippet:

• Mobile: Click on the responsive icon for mobile and enter:

In this example, our four-column row on desktop will fall into two columns on tablet, and on a mobile just one:

By setting specific widths for different breakpoints, you can create a more tailored layout that improves the user experience even further. Finally, intelligent content reflow patterns will ensure that your content adapts fluidly as screen sizes change, maintaining clarity and readability across all devices.

Build custom breakpoint systems for complex layouts

For intricate layouts, building custom breakpoint systems in Divi adds even more flexibility to your designs. While Divi provides default breakpoints at 980px and 767px, you can extend these with custom points tailored to your specific needs. This allows for greater control over how your design responds to various screen sizes.

To implement this in your module settings, head to Advanced > Custom CSS > Main Element and add the following CSS variables:

This setup enables you to create responsive designs that adapt to both screen sizes and content density.

Consider creating content-specific breakpoints for complex module arrangements, allowing different elements to display as-intended, across all devices. Set up rem-based scaling for consistent proportions, ensuring that all elements maintain their relative sizes. You can also configure breakpoint-specific module visibility to control which modules appear at different screen sizes.

Combining viewport units with these custom breakpoints creates layouts that respond dynamically to both screen size and content density. You’ll see this approach used by major news sites to maintain readability across diverse content variations – you simply can’t put a price on visual appeal!

Introducing Divi Life for responsive layouts and plugins

While Divi’s native responsive features provide a solid foundation for web design, complex websites often require specialized tools to achieve pixel-perfect responsive designs. 

At Divi Life – a leading Divi development company since 2016 – we’ve crafted a suite of tools that extend Divi’s responsive capabilities and allow you to create designs that match your vision. 

These tools are designed to help overcome common responsive design challenges, such as creating custom mobile menus, managing complex layouts, and ensuring device-specific content display. With our state-of-the-art offerings, you can supercharge your design process and create stunning, responsive websites with ease. 

Take a look at some of our plugins below and see the difference we can make to your Divi designs!

Divi Bricks: 1000+ mobile responsive layouts to choose from

Divi Bricks is an exceptional resource that provides access to over 1,000 pre-built mobile-responsive layouts. This extensive library includes both individual sections and full-page templates tailored to various industries, such as business, ecommerce, and more.

The one-click import process allows you to integrate these layouts into your existing projects, saving you valuable time. Each layout is designed to adapt automatically to different screen sizes, ensuring a consistent user experience across devices. You’ll find responsive layouts for everything from headers and footers to blogs, pricing tables, and testimonials, so you can build a foundation for your pages fast! 

What’s more, Divi Bricks enables you to mix and match sections from different templates, allowing for personalized designs that reflect your unique style while maintaining responsiveness. This flexibility makes it an invaluable tool for any Divi designer looking for better workflow organization.

Divi Hacks: Mobile hacks to ensure full responsiveness across your site!

If you want to get ahead, get a hack! Our aptly-named tool Divi Hacks is an innovative plugin that includes hundreds of solutions specifically designed to facilitate responsive design within the Divi framework. Among its many features are mobile hacks that improve the overall user experience on smaller devices.

Notable mobile hacks include:

• Mobile parallax: Create stunning parallax effects that work seamlessly on mobile devices.
• Collapse mobile submenus: Improve navigation by collapsing submenus for a cleaner interface.
• Reverse columns on mobile: Change the stacking order of columns specifically for mobile views.
• Fixed mobile header: Keep your header visible at all times for easier navigation.
• App-style header on mobile: Design headers that mimic popular app interfaces for a modern look.
• Full-screen mobile menu: Offer an immersive menu experience that takes advantage of the entire screen.
• Off-canvas mobile menu: Provide a sleek menu option that slides in from the side, saving screen space.

Divi Mobile Menu: Build custom mobile experiences

Divi Mobile Menu enables you to create custom mobile menus with ease, essential for crafting engaging experiences across non-desktop devices. Our plugin allows for slide-in menu animations and transitions, providing a smooth and visually appealing navigation experience for users on smaller screens.

You can customize mobile triggers and icons, enabling you to design a menu that aligns perfectly with your site’s branding. The hamburger menu styling options let you create a unique look that stands out while maintaining usability.

Divi Mobile Menu also gives you control over sub-menu behavior, allowing you to decide how sub-items are displayed on mobile devices. With mobile-specific menu layouts, you can ensure that your navigation is optimized for touch interactions. Best of all, it integrates with Divi’s native menu system, making it easy to refine your existing designs without having to start from scratch.

Divi Modules Pro: Creative modules that work on all devices

Divi Modules Pro is an essential tool for anyone looking to improve their ideas with pre-designed modules that provide advanced functionality across all devices. 

Our plugin offers a diverse range of creative modules, including:

• Timeline module: Timeline modules are perfect for showcasing events or milestones in a visually engaging format.
• Content Toggle: Ideal for pricing tables or FAQs, allowing users to expand and collapse content as needed.
• Flip Box: A Flip Box module offers a dynamic way to display information that flips to reveal more details on hover or click.
• Before and After Slider: Great for comparisons, our Before and After Slider module allows users to see changes side by side.

• Carousel and Masonry Galleries: Enhance your image displays with stylish galleries that adapt beautifully to different screen sizes.

One notable feature of Divi Modules Pro is its dynamic asset loading functionality, which optimizes performance across devices by only loading necessary assets when needed. This ensures a fast and responsive experience for users, regardless of their device type.

Check out our All-Access Pass for the full-suite of responsive Divi tools

Here, we’ve shared valuable tips and techniques to help you use Divi’s native tools effectively. You’ve also seen how third-party solutions can improve your responsive design capabilities even further.

At Divi Life, our suite of tools works harmoniously to create fully responsive websites that adapt to any device, empowering you to tackle complex design challenges with ease. By investing in our All-Access Pass, you gain access to all these magical tools through a single subscription, improving your workflows and maximizing your design potential. 

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to make your Divi projects truly stand out – check out our All-Access Pass today and grab the keys to responsive heaven!