Today, the majority of the users are accessing websites from their smartphones. For most of the things, they are relying on the phone rather than the desktop. For browsing, shopping, and playing games users are making use of their phone. This is the reason, responsive web design is very important for any website. UX optimization is the key behind the responsive design for mobiles and most of the small gadgets.
If you are expecting true performance optimization, there are many alternatives available. Today, in web development the highest emphasis is given to mobile-first experience. You can understand this in simple terms as optimizing your content, design, and of course entire site to mobile-first. So, let us understand how to optimize an existing site based on mobile-first design principles.
Designing keeping mobile in mind
The earlier web was built with principles mainly serving to desktop users. Advancements in technologies will indeed be beautiful when viewed on full screen. But, since more and more users started using mobile devices, mobile-first design is today’s requirement. You will see this being employed across a huge number of popular websites from dating and free sex hookup sites to editorial sites and large ecommerce websites. So, it’s time to adapt mobile-first principles in website design.
Here is a list of elements you need to consider for responsive design keeping in mind mobile users.
Prioritization
When a user is viewing the site on mobile, he has limited display space. More than that, mobile devices showcase content in a vertical manner. This is completely different from the horizontal and wider structure of desktops. So, prioritization is very important and everything should be easily made visible to mobile users.
Importance to context than color
It is very important to do interesting things but these things should be done in the scope of mobile rather desktop. So, always prioritize context first and color the second approach. The context should be easily visible and readable for mobile users. When it comes to forgiving highly distractive elements a mobile screen lack behind compared to desktop.
Navigation should be easy
It is very difficult to click on the mobile screen as you do it on the desktop. So, you can’t just click anywhere on this small screen. So, easy navigation should be given the highest importance on the mobile device. It is better to make use of elements like scroll-to-top widgets and sticky headers. Always double check on your phone before implementing something new. It is very important to examine how things are doing on a small screen and how they are flowing together.
Resource optimization
Media optimization is very important if you want to go creative with your site. Most of the components like videos, icons, illustrations, photos are the highest bandwidth consumes on the web pages. But there is no standard web page size that everyone can follow. One must use common sense so that their web page loads properly. The web page should load quickly and it should display all the contents on time. So, you must follow some measures to trim extra KBs from the visual contents.
Resize your images
It is not easy to resize images keeping the good quality. But, nothing to worry about since there are many alternatives you can utilize like using the links. You can use links for full-sized images so that they load only when necessary. O may resize images and it can shave off more than 80 percent of the total image. Mostly for mobile devices you can keep 600-700px range at most.
Use compression for files
When you need to image compression or optimization, you have to make use of some third-party tool for color reduction of the image. It is possible to achieve image optimization keeping the innate quality of the image. There are plenty of image compressing tools you can make use of for image optimization.
File formats-make use of alternatives
Among all, JPEG and PNG are popular image formats, and more than that they are standards as well when images to be displayed on web pages. But today there are many other file formats are in use and WebP and SVG are two of them. The best thing about these new image formats is they can easily scale to the screen size. They automatically reduce resources so that image fits the screen.
Lazy-loading and Pre-loading
There is no need to load all the media resources present on a web page all at once. There is a feature called browser hints or pre-loaders. Through pre-loaders, you can inform the browser about more and more potential navigation opportunities.
In some cases, you may have to load the entire page when you need only some resources on it. But, this doesn’t happen with lazy loading. When lazy loading is implemented you will be downloading the part of the page that is visible currently. Based on the requirement and request remaining part of the page is downloaded.
Conclusion
It is possible to achieve the mobile-first design and implement optimization for mobile users. There are many ways to do it and most importantly the developer should give the highest priority to mobile-first principles.