Even though responsive design is perfect for the multi-screen world that we live in, there still is a drop in performance due to larger file sizes.
This issue has been highlighted by a study that reveals that almost 86% of websites still deliver a page for desktops to mobile devices. This is a design technique that needs addressing if this trend of bloated web pages has to stop.
As for those pages that need to be optimized, here are 3 ways to speed up your responsive websites:
#1: Images
It’s a known fact that images take up the most number of kilobytes when downloading a page. Of course, it’s a known fact that if images have been added for a desktop, it won’t necessarily function well when accessed with a smartphone. It will only get worse if the site has legacy content.
So, in order to fix this problem, one can use Adaptive Images along with Fluid Image techniques. This will ensure that the images delivered to the device will be scaled down appropriately, and won’t affect loading speed adversely.
#2: Text
One difficult aspect of reading text on narrower devices is that it wraps naturally and can cause display issues. However, a tool like FitText can help fix this which can auto-update font size and where you can set the minimum and maximum size.
#3: Conditional Loading
This feature is to ensure that mobile and smartphone don’t download parts of the website that can slow it up or even those that they don’t use at all. This could include images, maps and social widgets and so on and so forth.
It’s vital that you test the site once you optimize it with conditional loading to see how it affects the downloading speed of the site for the aforementioned users.