How To Optimize A Site For Mobile

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.

What is Google’s AMP Framework?

In the fast-moving world, we all do not want to keep waiting for things especially when it is related to technology. Be it any application or any website, we all want it to load quickly and open up quickly. According to a survey also, it is being said that if a website does not load in 5 to 6 seconds, the visitors leave the website instantly. To cope with this problem, Google founded a solution for it in the year 2016, so that it can help such websites and webpages. It is known as Google AMP. The AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. With the help of this technology, one can easily open a website without any delay. As it will hardly take one second in loading. This will also help you in saving the data, as it uses less data than before when it comes to opening the regular web pages.

What is Google AMP?

If we talk in technical terms, then Google AMP is a kind of technology made for publishing the website by creating the web pages which will load instantly or within a second on the mobile phones. So, far more than 1.5 billion AMP pages have been published by over 25 million domains.

Google AMP’s framework

We all are accessing many AMP pages every day, so we should also know how they are created. For building the AMP Pages, firstly, you should make another version of your website. And ensure that it follows the standards of the AMP Project. Once you are done with doing it, you will get a URL for your AMP website. That AMP website URL which you will get will work on different web browsers. Like it will work on Safari, Chrome, and Firefox also. When you visit or open any AMP Page from the Google search results, they will load very fast. It is because Google does the hosting of the AMP webpages on the servers of Google. And then it directly served the content on its website.

Those who are using the AMP Project technology will be happy to know, that Google gives more importance to such web pages when it is about the search engine ranking. For all sort of news stories, AMP is required for getting the number one rank among the search results on the mobile. However, AMP is not linked to the search engine optimization, but it helps in boosting the search engine ranking. Now, you all would have understood the importance of Google AMP.

Why Google AMP was created?

If you have read above how Google AMP framework works, you would have got an idea about why it is necessary. Let’s know in details why it was created. When we all surf the internet and we search, we want to get quick search results. So, to help the users to get quick search results and to enhance the speed of the search results, Google has done it. Google wants its users to be able to access the content in just fraction of seconds. Because Google also understands that in this competitive environment, no one wants to wait for a website to load or to browse any content. So, this was created basically for the user’s benefit only.

Benefits of Google AMP

Google AMP has helped the webpage developers a lot and it is at present helping the news websites also. There are many benefits of Google AMP, which people should know which we have mentioned below.

  • Increase in Mobile Ranking – As we just mentioned above that AMP is not directly linked with the search engine ranking. But it affects the search engine ranking positively. As it helps to load a website faster, so Google gives more importance to websites which are using AMP Framework.
  • Improvement in the Server Performance – This is especially for those websites which have tons of traffic on their website accessed using a mobile phone. The load on your website because of huge traffic can downgrade its performance. But that load can be reduced with the help of the AMP. It not just reduces the load of traffic on the server, but it also enhances the performance of the server.

What is Responsive Web Design?

Anyone in business that is taking advantage of the online market has realized the essential need of a responsive web design. In the modern world there are different ways in which people access the internet ranging from desktop computers, tablets to small accessories like smartphones. As a business individual your website should be compatible with different kinds of screen resolution. This brings us to the question, what is responsive web design?

Responsive web design

A responsive web design is an approach whereby an individual creates a web page that is able to respond or resize itself depending on the type of design and approach that is being used. It could be an oversized desktop computer, monitor, laptop device or a small screen such as tablet or smartphone. For any individual with a digital smartphone it has become very essential in case you want an effective digital presence. There is an overwhelming growth of smartphones, tablets as well as mobile computing devices as the number of people using smaller screens for viewing web pages continue to increase rapidly.

Most of the websites that are being developed in the present have to consider mobile-first index. Many businesses are increasing their mobile presence and this implies that their websites, eCommerce, Google Business page and social media pages need to be accessible through different devices. One look at any of the best dating sites or the best hookup apps will reveal a strong emphasis on responsive web design as the vast majority of their users are accessing via mobile devices.

How to make a responsive website

The practice of making a responsive website entails a mix of flexible grids as well as layouts and images for the intelligent use of CSS media queries. Once the use switches from using their laptop to iPad then the website should be able to switch automatically in order to accommodate resolution, image size and scripting abilities. The website should be able to automatically respond to the user’s preference. For instance, the website should be able to respond accordingly in case of VPN for iOS.

How it works

A typical website comprises of a set of files that is a web page, home page and about page is an individual file on its own. The files contain html codes as well as text and images. The web pages are styled with files called CSS or rather Cascading Style Sheets. For example, a standard website that is non responsive contains a set of files and a couple of CSS files that govern its look. A responsive website will apply the same CSS files depending on the device being used to access the site. This will make it look and respond differently based on the device.

Why is it important?

There was a time when the only way people could access the website was through a desktop computer. Most people had almost the same size of monitors hence most of the websites were designed for average visitors. Today, most people access websites through a variety of devices ranging from screens of up to 27” and more to very small devices. The consumers expect that the websites they are visiting conform to the needs of the devices they are using and not the other way around.