Responsive Web Design (RWD) has made a huge impact as an approach to designing for mobile. It has also caused a lot of debate: on the plus side, it allows for one codebase to cater to devices with a range of different screen sizes. On the debit side, serving the same payload to all devices irrespective of device capabilities, screen size and resolution, and indeed connection speed, can effectively close off entire markets to companies who don’t optimize.
This paper outlines 3 easy methods to achieve significant performance improvements for Responsive sites using
- Responsive images
- JavaScript and CSS optimizations
- Optimizing for available bandwidth.
It’s hard to over-emphasize the importance of basic UX issues such as page load times. Larger brands know that adapting their content to the increasingly varied devices and contexts that people use to get online has a positive effect on engagement and sales. Much research has shown that abandonment rates increase in parallel with load times. Responsive has offered a way for companies to provide a unified website experience across different device types, but it often comes at the expense of heavy sites that aren’t optimized well for mobile devices and compromised connectivity.
RESS (Responsive Web Design with Server Side components) offers a way to get the best of both worlds: a responsive website design that is fully optimized for different device types. By using DeviceAtlas as the server side component, you can make significant performance improvements over ‘classic’ RWD and enjoy the concurrent uplift in reach, without the need for any ongoing maintenance. Your responsive site will work on almost any device, rather than the desktop, tablet and smartphone buckets of typical RWD implementations, and load faster in all cases. All it takes is a few lines of code, and some simple configuration.
