Responsive web design is rapidly growing popularity among people worldwide. It is ideal for the internet supported devices due to its responsive and adaptive nature. Today, more and more people are heading towards responsive web design as an effective solution to deliver a consistent experience across distinct screen resolutions.

User interface and user experience are the most essential parts in the development of client and product relationship. User interface determines the user’s response towards particular site. Whereas, user experience with the observation of products for the site. Also, it deals with the reaction and understanding to the users.

We all are getting excited about responsive web design. However, there are some performance issues that can be overcome to some extent by making some adjustments, image re-sizing and compression. The size of pages and the resources that are loaded with it should be reduced to improve the performance of website. This can be accomplished by using different techniques, without altering the look and feel of the website.

Google’s Recommendations For Improved Site Performance

Here are a few recommendations provided by Google to help web developers improve their site performance on the mobile devices. It has been observed through the research that the delay of more than one second in the page loading leads to poor user experience.

Google recommends that the response time by server should be less than 200ms and another 200ms to render above-the-fold content on your page. Also, they recommend the following:

• Minimum number of redirects
• Minimum number of round-trips to first render
• Avoid the use of external blocking CSS & JavaScript in above-the-fold-content
• JavaScript implementation and rendering time should be optimized

Bigger Web Pages Lowers Site Performance

The average size of webpage is now growing every day, as big as 1532KB. We all know that larger pages reduce the site performance and lead to higher bandwidth costs. It takes much longer to load a web page on mobile devices. Bigger sites work fine on the desktops, but create trouble for the mobile users, especially if they are using 3G. With the growing demand for the perfectly optimized page for all the devices, it is essential for the developers and designers to prioritize performance and set up performance budget for the project.

Here are a few noteworthy tips to improve the site performance and the user experience:

# Establish An Effective Performance Budget

A performance budget refers to the forethought limit on the overall size and speed of a page. It serves as a beret to spending page bloat just like in financial budget. Make sure that there is enough space within the budget, before amending new elements or pages. If the addition of new element may exceed your budget, you need to optimize an existing feature that is less complicated and is a bit faster, remove any of the existing features or not to add the new feature at all.

# Ensure Better Optimization Of Images

Images are one of the biggest problems with the slow page loading on responsive websites. With the growing use of retina devices, people are heading towards higher resolution images for their sites. You should determine that the pages should not be cluttered with 1mb images. The service like Adaptive images can be used to manage such issues. It is a short PHP script that detects the screen size and then, automatically resizes, caches & serves as a scaled-down image. The software can be customized easily, so that you can set the image quality and browser caching.

# Enable Compression To Ensure Faster Loading

It is good to compress the resources using Gzip to reduce the number of bytes that a page to be sent across the network. This not only makes it easier for the users to navigate and access your site with faster loading pages, but also, improves the efficiency of web server resources.

# Remove Avoidable Features

It is important for you to understand that often your different elements are used by the users as it easier to identify the elements that can be removed to improve the site performance. If the responsive page does not rely substantially on social sharing as its major traffic source, then it is recommended to remove them.

# Right Hosting Solution For Better Performance

There is a wide range of hosting packages cheap shared hosting to cloud services and fully dedicated servers that are costlier. In order to get the best value for your money, it is suggested to invest time doing thorough research on web hosting packages. You can consider the performance of your competitor’s websites and the select the quickest one. 

Conclusion

You can follow the above tips and guidelines to optimize your responsive website for better performance and will definitely help you to provide your users with a great browsing experience.

Author Bio:

Daniel Peterson is a skillful web developer at Email Chopper, which provide the best PSD to email template conversion service. He likes to share his innovative ideas through various articles and blogs.