Mobile First Responsive Website Design

Mobile first responsive website design is the new standard for coding and optimizing websites. The overriding principal is to make the performance of your website on a mobile-device your number one priority. This means that your website must be designed and coded to work well on smaller screens, with touch-based interactions, and with slower internet speeds.

In the past, website design and coding was focused on desktop computers and laptops. This is no longer the case. With over half of all web traffic now coming from mobile devices, it is essential that your website is designed and coded with these users in mind.

There are a few key things to keep in mind when coding a mobile first responsive website:

• Use a responsive design framework: This will ensure that your website automatically adapts to different screen sizes.
• Optimize your images: Mobile users are often on slower internet connections, so it is important to optimize your images for faster loading times.
• Minimize your code: Mobile devices have limited processing power, so it is important to keep your code as lean and clean as possible.
• Use touch-based interactions: Mobile users interact with websites differently than desktop users, so it is important to design your website with touch interactions in mind.

Site Speed is Critical to Mobile-First Design.

Mobile-first design is about making your website faster. The faster your website is, the better experience people will have when they visit it on their phones. If your website isn't fast enough according to Google's PageSpeed Insights, then you need to rewrite your code.

Test Your Site Speed

Understanding PageSpeed Insights Results

• Google Lighthouse is the engine that helps Google's PageSpeed Insights analyse web apps and pages. This provides real-time performance metrics and action opportunities to improve website performance. Many website testing services use Lighthouse to provide performance metrics of the websites they analyse.
• First Contentful Paint is the time it takes for the browser to display text or images on your web page. This is one of six metrics Lighthouse uses to grade your site's performance. One of the most common causes of sites failing this metric is using webfonts.
• Speed Index is a measure of how quickly your website's visitors can see the content on your web page. This makes a huge impact on how satisfied your website's visitors will be. It is a performance metric that can make or break keeping a visitor on your website.
• The largest contentful paint is the amount of time it takes for the biggest text or picture on a website to show up. This includes any text or pictures that are visible before someone scrolls down.
• Time to Interactive is how quickly the web page's features are fully interactive for your site's visitors. This means that anything on your site that reacts when the visitor touches it (clicks on it) or types into form fields works without delay.
• Total Blocking Time is a metric that measures how quickly your web page accepts user input, including screen taps, mouse clicks and keyboard typing. This web page performance metric impacts your page's Time to Interactive performance metric.
• Cumulative Layout Shift is when something unexpected happens on your web page that makes it look unstable. The page can be jumpy, which makes it harder for people to see what's going on and can be really distracting.

By following these guidelines, you can ensure that your website provides a great experience for mobile users. This is essential for both SEO and for conversion rates. Mobile users are more likely to abandon a website that is not designed for their devices, so it is essential to get it right.

If you are not sure where to start, we can help you optimize your website's code for mobile devices or build a new site following the best practices of mobile website design.