Website Performance Optimization Through Mobile First Design and Other Strategies

If you have a stable connection to high-speed mobile Internet, this page loads on your mobile device in 1 second. Are you or your own website visitors willing to wait longer to access content? However, our team did not test the visitors’ patience, and by using a mobile first design, we ensured fast loading and comfortable viewing of this web page. Also, we constantly monitor website performance and take measures to minimize the risk of inconvenience to users.

Meanwhile, in 53 cases out of 100, users leave a mobile site that takes more than 3 seconds to load without waiting. I want your business website visitors to stay on it and delve into the content you offer. In this article, I will share tips on achieving high performance and an excellent mobile user experience for your website.

You will learn to adhere to mobile first web design when making a mobile website. Also, you will explore which metrics business owners and managers can use to evaluate the experience of their sites and determine ways to improve it.

How to Measure Your Website’s Performance: Key Metrics for Ensuring Optimal Site Performance

We’ve achieved scores of 97-100% in website performance because we continuously monitor and fine-tune our site. Keeping a close eye on key metrics allows us to identify issues early and optimize accordingly. If you’re looking to enhance your website’s performance, the first step is understanding what to measure and where to find this data.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through exactly how we monitor Core Web Vitals and other essential metrics. By the end, you’ll have a step-by-step process to evaluate your website’s health, improve user experience, and stay competitive in search rankings.

Key Factors That Influence Website Performance

1. Fast Loading Times
   Slow-loading sites can lead to higher bounce rates and lower user engagement. Users expect pages to load quickly, especially on mobile devices.
2. Mobile-Specific Optimization
   Many websites overlook mobile optimization. It’s crucial to measure your site’s performance specifically for mobile devices, as the user experience on mobile differs significantly from desktop.
3. Core Web Vitals Metrics
   These are key indicators Google uses to assess the overall performance of a site. Ensuring your site meets these metrics will help improve your ranking.
4. User Experience and Accessibility
   Easy navigation and a smooth user experience are essential. Google values websites that are convenient for visitors to use, so prioritize this aspect in your optimizations.

Step-by-Step Guide to Monitoring Core Web Vitals

1. Use the Right Tools:

Before diving into the metrics, it’s crucial to know where to check them. Google provides several tools for tracking Core Web Vitals:

• Google PageSpeed Insights: A straightforward tool for analyzing page performance on mobile and desktop. This tool offers precise data about users who visit your pages. While it may signal issues with a delay, it’s an optimal tool for ensuring a smooth user experience and preventing errors from affecting search rankings.
• Google Search Console: Provides real-world data on how your site performs for actual users. However, errors tend to appear here with significant delay. The key is to catch these issues in PageSpeed Insights before they surface in Search Console to prevent ranking drops.
• Lighthouse (in Chrome DevTools): A developer-focused tool for running detailed performance audits. While we use Lighthouse to verify the quality of our releases, for understanding client-based performance from Google’s perspective, PageSpeed Insights remains more reliable.
• Custom Looker Studio Reports: For the most up-to-date performance tracking, we rely on our custom Google Looker Studio report. It provides near real-time data (with only a slight delay of up to one day), allowing us to detect and resolve issues even before they appear in Search Console or PageSpeed Insights. This is critical for staying ahead of potential problems.

2. Monitor Regularly and After Key Updates:

Consistent monitoring is essential to ensure your website maintains optimal performance. Here’s how we approach it:

• Weekly checks: We recommend reviewing your site’s performance data at least once a week. This helps catch issues early and keeps performance metrics stable.
• Post-release testing: After every update or change to your site, whether it’s a new feature, design tweak, or content update, immediately test your Core Web Vitals. We always validate each release with tools like Lighthouse to ensure no new performance issues arise.
• Proactive monitoring: Instead of waiting for errors to show up in the Google Search Console (which can take weeks), rely on real-time data from tools like PageSpeed Insights or a custom Looker Studio report. This allows us to identify potential problems and act before they impact rankings or user experience.

3. Focus on Key Metrics:

Now, let’s break down the key Web Vitals metrics you should be monitoring. These are crucial for improving the overall user experience and can directly impact your rankings and conversion rates.

Focusing on optimizing your site for mobile performance is essential because the majority of web traffic comes from mobile, and users expect fast, seamless experiences. That’s why we switched to a mobile-first design approach, ensuring our site performs well across all devices. In future articles, we’ll share our stories and tips for making the mobile-first shift, along with the best practices we’ve learned along the way.

Mobile First Responsive Design for Website Development

Google’s Core Web Vitals are especially sensitive on mobile, meaning even small issues can negatively affect user experience and search rankings. We shifted to mobile-first practices to stay ahead in delivering a seamless, high-performance experience across all devices.

We’ve boosted our site’s speed, usability, and overall engagement by prioritizing mobile-first design. This approach has been key to improving both our user satisfaction and SEO performance.

Mobile First Development Shapes Today’s Web

Statistics convincingly show that today, mobile website development deserves close attention and specific approaches.

High performance, mobile responsive design, and good usability—all these factors help you win the interest and loyalty of an immense number of customers. Those building sites with mobile devices in mind gain access to a broad audience and promising markets.

#1 The majority of web traffic is on mobile devices.

It is safe to say that mobile devices have become the world’s #1 channel for user access to web resources. Over the past five years, from Q3 2019, users have consistently generated more than half of global website traffic via mobile devices, excluding tablets. At the end of 2023, for example, mobile devices (without tablets) accounted for 54.67% of website traffic worldwide.

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#2 Increasing mobile searches for products and services

The value of mobile web development and mobile first design for business websites is becoming more and more visible. Mobile devices are crucial in finding information about businesses and their products and services.

Remember that 57% of local search queries come from mobile devices. Also, mobile searches lead to clicks much more often than desktop searches (65.6% versus 38.5%). In addition, statistics tell us that 51% of users have found a new company or product while searching on their smartphones.

The contribution of mobile searches in some industries is simply priceless. According to some studies in the U.S., the share of mobile searches in Food and Beverage was 72%, Health - 68%, Automotive - 62%, and Retail - 56%.

#3 The rise of mobile device sales

You can expect a large potential audience when making a mobile website for a business. For example, buyers via mobile devices are driving the growth of e-commerce worldwide. Accordingly, the significance of m-commerce (mobile commerce) and mobile web development for the e-commerce market is dynamically increasing.

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In 2023, m-commerce sales exceeded half of all e-commerce retail sales, reaching approximately $1.7 trillion. According to some estimates, the share of m-commerce in the total volume of e-commerce may increase to 63% by 2028. In the first quarter of 2024, consumers generated over 3/4 of global retail site traffic and 2/3 of online shopping orders through smartphones.

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The given data highlight how profitable it is for businesses to gain the affection of the mobile users’ audience. However, to achieve this goal, when making a mobile website, you must provide a mobile experience that is not inferior to the user experience on other devices. In particular, you should pay due attention to your website’s performance.

In this article, I emphasize that mobile first design is important because, combined with other website performance improvement approaches, it helps meet the challenges facing mobile web development, including ensuring a seamless experience for the mobile user.

Apply a Mobile First Responsive Design Approach

Modern web development tools are pretty sufficient to get a mobile responsive website. When making a mobile website, you can use mobile responsive design techniques along with performance optimization across portable devices, allowing you to meet the expectations of website visitors through mobile devices.

At the same time, the meaning of mobile first design goes beyond what is usually understood by UI/UX design. This approach affects all aspects of creating websites. In particular, here’s what to pay attention to in mobile web page development.

What is Mobile First Design?

Mobile-first design (aka mobile-first design) is a strategy whereby web developers create the mobile version first, then extend it to larger screens, such as desktops. With this approach, usability on small-screen devices is really maximized, and one can rest assured that core functionality and content will remain easily accessible.

Among the best practices of mobile web development can be noted

• Faster load times with mobile-first development: Mobile-first designs inherently focus on minimalism, reducing load times.
• Optimizing performance with a mobile-first approach: Prioritizing simplicity and optimizing media files ensure faster performance.

Desktop-first design vs. mobile-first design

Desktop-first design would take a website design and squeeze or stretch it to fit a number of different screen sizes, starting with the desktop view. Mobile-first development would start with designing for mobile devices and then move to larger screens. The main difference is that with mobile-first design, the starting point begins with simplicity, featuring only what is necessary. Responsive design takes existing content and tries to work it into smaller platforms.

When to use desktop-first design vs. mobile-first design

Desktop-first responsive design is more fitted for content-heavy websites that serve more frequency to desktop users. On the contrary, for an audience dominantly on mobile phones-for example, on e-commerce and social media-one should be developing with a mobile-first design approach to get in tune with ease of navigation and usability.

The mobile first design is important because it corresponds to the omnichannel principle, which is gaining popularity in e-commerce and other fields. Mobile first website design contributes to a seamless user experience across all available channels. Indeed, today’s customer journey can begin in a showroom, continue online, and end with a smartphone.

The technical arsenal of mobile first development allows the user to interact comfortably and continuously without being distracted by technical details, but instead focusing on the brand and the product.

How mobile-first responsive design works

Mobile-first responsive design builds a website to prioritize mobile users. This means creating a site with optimized content, reduced clutter, and streamlined navigation. Once the mobile version is complete, the design is adapted to larger screens without sacrificing core features.

Principles of mobile-first web design:

• Focus on content and functionality: Prioritize the essential content and functions that mobile users need.
• Simplifying navigation and user interface: Keep the design simple and intuitive for mobile interactions.
• Ensuring fast loading times: Optimize the website for speed to prevent users from waiting on slower mobile connections.

A Step-by-step Guide to Implementing Mobile First Design on Your Website

#1 Identify pages or elements that are slowing down performance

First, identify the pages or elements in your website that don’t perform up to par, especially on mobile devices. It could be very slow-loading pages, heavy images, or elements not optimized for small screens. Use the metrics and tools I advised above to find performance bottlenecks.

Prioritize fixing elements that hamper user experience the most.

#2 Evaluate the possible impact of the IT infrastructure on the website`s performance

Sometimes, not all website performance and user experience issues arise on your end.

You might want to check out the following:

• Hardware characteristics in the case of on-premise servers
• Hosting and vendor-provided options for cloud servers
• Internet connection speed and stability

Identify IT infrastructure deficiencies that may hinder site performance. You can resolve these obstacles with your ISP or cloud vendor, etc.

#3 Ensure mobile-friendly UI/UX design

Before rewriting the code, study your website’s UI/UX design for its responsiveness on a mobile device. Sure, most modern websites are somehow responsive for mobile devices, but just double-check whether everything goes well with small screens.

Suppose the UI is too outdated or doesn’t provide a good experience on mobile devices. In that case, you probably need to redesign the most critical elements, such as navigation menus or call-to-action buttons. However, as a rule, most websites today have a mobile responsive design.

#4 Rewrite the code for prioritized elements of your website

Once you’ve identified the high-impact pages or elements, start rewriting the code with a mobile first website design approach. Begin with the most common elements like headers, footers, and navigation bars that appear across your site. Starting with these common elements allows you to apply changes across the mobile responsive website without needing to rewrite the entire scope.

#5 Use the best practices for your mobile first design website

Above all, remember the helpful rules for effective mobile web page development:

• Prioritize essential content to avoid overwhelming mobile users.
• Use responsive mobile design techniques to scale the website smoothly across all devices.
• Optimize images and media for mobile screens, ensuring faster load times and an improved user experience.

My practical tips for mobile web page development are also relevant to the principles and techniques of the mobile first design.

Take a mobile-first approach to writing code.

By making separate documents for styles for each screen size (device type), we reduced the amount of code by 40-50%.

Write and deploy custom JavaScript code.

JavaScript code is required for web page interactivity. If you use many JavaScript libraries, downloading them entirely can slow down the website. After all, there is usually a separate document for each action in such libraries, far from all you need.

We write custom JavaScript code, such as universal functions, to minimize the use of libraries. Such solutions benefit performance.

#6 Monitor the performance of redesigned pages

After implementing changes, it is crucial to track the performance dynamics of your redesigned pages. Use the metrics and tools I’ve already discussed for this. This step will help you understand whether the mobile first website design changes have improved overall performance and user experience.

Compare the data for both mobile and desktop users regularly to ensure that your mobile website development is delivering the intended results. If performance improves significantly on mobile, continue with the remaining prioritized elements or pages.

Another practical recommendation of mine concerns performance monitoring, not only of updated elements but also of your mobile responsive website as a whole. You can define such a system when making a mobile website or setting it up for an already-running website. It is based on, but may not be limited to, Core Web Vitals.

In particular, monitoring and analyzing additional metrics from Web Vitals is advisable. For example, I constantly track the Total Blocking Time (TBT). The time when the browser is blocked by some operations, such as third-party services or third-party script code, can also affect the mobile user experience.

It is also essential to introduce metrics reporting and analysis features with their visualization. To get the images I used to illustrate our website performance measurement and analysis, we set up our reporting system using Lookerstudio.

As you can see, mobile first design is important because it is one of the means of ensuring the high performance of a website aimed at users of mobile devices.

After all, mobile-first design and mobile web development best practices have significant potential to optimize websites and ensure a seamless mobile user experience. My colleagues and I constantly make sure of this by improving the mobile-friendly websites of our company and its customers.

Real-Life Improvements: How Dashdevs Enhanced Website Performance

Our website, on which you are reading this article, contains various types of content, including animations, videos, and many high-quality images. Nevertheless, our team ensured the high performance of this complex web system.

With the help of the in-house team or our web experts, you can also ensure excellent website performance with mobile responsive design. Many subtleties matter in this area. I’ll share some of them, telling how we achieved the optimal values of our website performance metrics.

#1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

When looking for ways to improve LCP, the first thing you should pay attention to is the display of images. The placement of the images on the page and the priority of their loading - matter.

On those pages, where possible, it is appropriate not to place a large image in such a way that PageSpeed ​​or other measurement systems perceive it as the same largest contentful paint by which they define LCP.

A proven solution is image preloading, which can be configured for specific screen sizes (device types). By working properly with images, we have achieved a reduction in LCP.

While improving the LCP, you should also keep the text elements in view. Adding style files for text elements in the layout also positively affects LCP.

Recommended solutions:

• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Reduces the distance between the server and the user.
• Optimize images: Compress and use modern formats (e.g., WebP) for faster loading.
• Preload key resources: Ensure essential elements like fonts or large images load quickly.

#2 Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

When improving INP, it is essential to make sure that no timeouts are set for clicks. By ensuring that there are no timeouts for user clicks, we have improved INP. However, it is important to understand that timeouts for some elements, such as animations, do not affect INP.

Recommended solutions:

• Set size attributes for media: Define width and height for images and videos to prevent unexpected shifts.
• Reserve space for ads and iframes: Allocate fixed space for dynamic elements to avoid layout shifts.
• Avoid inserting content above existing content: This prevents sudden movements on the page.

#3 Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Optimizing CLS, I once again made sure that the dimensions of the page display, particularly the height, and the location of large elements, such as banners, significantly affect this parameter. By correctly setting the page height (in pixels), we have ensured that the CLS value is within the recommended range.

Recommended solutions:

• Reduce JavaScript execution time: Minimize heavy scripts and defer unnecessary ones.
• Optimize event handling: Prioritize responsiveness to user actions by offloading non-critical tasks.
• Use web workers: Offload background tasks from the main thread to improve interactivity.

#4 Time to First Byte (TTFB)

All Web Vitals are interrelated. For example, a deviation of TTFB from the recommended parameters can indicate the presence or impending problems with a metric such as LCP.

Recommended solutions:

• Reduce render-blocking resources: Defer non-critical CSS and JavaScript.
• Minimize server response time: Reduce bottlenecks like large database queries.
• Use lazy loading: Load non-critical images and content only when needed.

#5 First Contentful Paint (FCP)

In turn, FCP, similar to TTFB, also displays the loading experience and is helpful for diagnosing the status and possible problems with LCP.

Recommended solutions:

• Optimize server response time: Use caching, optimize databases, and reduce server load.
• Use a CDN: Distribute content geographically to minimize response time.
• Optimize backend processes: Reduce delays in server-side processing.

Final Thoughts

The success of your business is forged, including online. A mobile first design can significantly boost your daily operations because more Internet users are looking to interact with sites using mobile devices. Therefore, search engines consider the performance and mobile user experience of websites when ranking.

The tips I provided in this article will help you implement a mobile first design approach when creating or optimizing a mobile website. The practical implementation of mobile first design will help promote your site in search engines, increase organic traffic, improve user experience, and conversion.

Using the recommended mobile responsive website performance metrics, site owners can independently assess their satisfaction and assess when it is necessary to turn to mobile web development experts for help.

I shared my experience in mobile first website design, optimizing mobile website performance, and other aspects of mobile web development on the example of our site. In general, the DashDevs team has launched more than 500 software products for its clients and has mastered many subtleties in various industries.

Contact us, and we will help turn your website into a platform for long-term mutually beneficial interaction between your business and its customers.