Mobile-First Approach: The key to building a Responsive Website
Mobile traffic overtook desktop traffic in 2018. It is a paradigm shift in the approach of users.
This trend was envisioned much earlier by global search giant Google.
In November 2016, Google announced that it is going for a mobile-first approach for indexing the search results. Why would Google do that? You see, Google realized that most of the searches on Google were being directed from Mobile devices. While most of the websites were not optimized for Mobile back then, hence people who used to search on Mobile did not have an excellent experience. To change this, Google decided to make this significant shift in its algorithm.
Hence websites that are optimized according to the mobile platform will be at an advantage in terms of ranking on Google, as compared to desktop-only sites. In this new world order, Mobile is the new king, and a mobile-first approach will help you in reaching more customers. Let us see how.
Difference between a responsive and mobile-first design
Many times people tend to confuse a mobile responsive website with a mobile-first one.
A mobile responsive website is a web design strategy in which the desktop website is ‘fit’ into a mobile screen. This is the result of a desktop-first approach, in which the website is designed keeping in mind the desktop version and then through programming it is ensured that the site’s layout and content fit into the mobile device. The process is known as graceful degradation in web development.
The thing with the desktop-first approach is that sometimes it looks as if the website is being forced on to the small screen, as a few visual aspects do not fit-in properly. To combat this, the developers take a progressive enhancement/ mobile-first route where the website is built considering the needs of the mobile user first.
Taking the progressive enhancement route
A mobile-first approach helps you in building better websites that support a wide array of features that would work in old browsers. There was a time when the number of mobile users was lesser as compared to the number of desktop users.
At that time, it made sense to design the website according to the desktop experience and then degrade it to fit the mobile screen. Not the best option for mobile users, but then it worked in the good old days. But things have changed as cut-throat competition, Open-source OS like Android and the advent of Smartphones have ensured that there has been a population explosion in the number of mobile devices all around the world.
Now, the number of mobile users far exceeds the number of desktop users. Hence this approach has to be changed; progressive enhancement is the best way forward. In progressive enhancement, we follow a bottom-up approach in which we design the website for the most used platform first, and then gradually scale up to enhance its compatibility with other platforms. Something like this:
Using a mobile-first approach forces you to adopt a progressive enhancement design approach.
Take, for example, designing the landing page of a flight booking website. Here we create the site in such a manner that the most important functions like selecting the date, route selection, return flight selection, arranging the flights according to the time of departure are prominently displayed. As these are the essential functions, it makes sense to utilize the already short mobile real estate space in a manner that these functions are easy to find. Then we expand the area by adding more tasks like advertising and promotions, customer service, seat selection we get to the desktop version of the website.
Having such an approach allows the designers to include the most important features first and then scale-up to include the other elements. Thus a mobile-first approach helps in designing a website in the most productive manner saving time and effort of the designers and also making sure that no necessary features are left out.
Things to consider in the mobile-first approach
In terms of mobile-first, less is more
While it is true that longer content is generally preferred by users while designing content for Mobile you need to ensure that the material is long enough to provide the necessary information and short enough to fit into the small mobile screen. Hence eliminate ruthlessly the filler content that you have used in your desktop version and make the content crisp and easy to find.
For e.g.:- does your website really need those 15 FAQs? Could you shorten that description of the ‘cool’ feature that your site has? Look for avenues to reduce content, remember minimalism is a necessity and not an added feature while designing content for Mobile.
Include a search function on your mobile website, and this would ensure that you are able to find the service on the site easily.
There is no point in stacking your mobile website with lots of content if the text is small and the users have to zoom-in to view the content properly. This will ruin the entire experience.
Improve page load speeds
One of the most critical determinants of a website’s success is its loading speed. The faster your website loads, the better it is for user retention, as when the user is searching for something, it is hard to retain him/her if the website is slow to load. The first thing is that mobile devices are typically slow to load because even if the user has a 4G connection, there is bound to be a data cap in most countries. While on desktop websites you will have the luxury of putting lots of big, high-resolution images, you cannot afford to waste precious screen real estate of a mobile site by loading it with large photos.
When you design a website for Mobile, you need to optimize it in such a way that it provides a path of least resistance to the user in achieving his/her objectives of visiting your website in the first place.
Another vital determinant in improving the page load speed is to improve the perceived page load speed. To do this, you will need to ensure that the above-the-fold content has fully loaded in the shortest possible time. By doing this, you ensure that by the time the below-the-fold content has unfolded the user is still engaged with above-the-fold content. This way, although the page loading speed is not that fast, it seems soon to the user.
Here are a few things that you can do to improve the website speed:
- To customize the content delivery according to the location of the users, you can install a CDN.
- You should use caching to reduce the website loading time. It becomes easy in case your website is built on Wordpress, there are caching plugins which will make the job easier.
- Using an HTTPS protocol will help in increasing the security of your website along with improving its speed.
- Optimizing images is an excellent way to boost the speed as they are significant culprits in slowing the website down. Use Lazy-loading to deliver images in a faster manner. You could think of coding instead of adding the image, and this would also help in improving the site loading speed.
Optimize the navigation menu
Suppose displaying a navigation menu as it is on the desktop version takes up a lot of space, then, you could re-design the menu to optimize it to a version that suits the mobile-view. A lot of swiping and scrolling will take place on the mobile screen, hence design the navigation menu of the website accordingly.
Test
Finally, place importance on testing. Your mobile website should look good on all browsers and should be compatible with most of the old versions of Ios and Android. This could be achieved by conducting an A/B testing which would help you in optimizing the pages according to the mobile version of your website.
Concluding thoughts
As we have seen time and again, Google’s change in the algorithm is a reflection of a shift in internet user behavior. As mobile traffic grows, a mobile-first approach is the way forward and will reap rich dividends to businesses that show agility in re-designing their websites, keeping the mobile user on top-priority. If you want to know more about how you can apply a mobile-first approach on your website then consult with verified web development companies and decide about upgrading your website as per design perspective.
