How to Scale the Website for Different Mobile Devices

Today, we surf the internet mostly from our mobile devices, instead of desktops or laptops because mobiles are easily accessible and very handy. A huge majority of mobile users are buying online and paying their utility bills with these devices. The worldwide pandemic has escalated online purchases and transactions as people are forced to stay and work at home due to the quarantines imposed.

With the massive growth, companies and businesses are encouraged to build websites and eCommerce websites that look, function, feel, and perform on computers as well as mobile devices. Nevertheless, most of the time, a website’s browsing experience on a smartphone is not the same as on a desktop or laptop. In website development, web pages are composed typically with one or several of these: main content, images, header and footer, videos, forms, and tables.

Devices vary in dimension of the screen, resolution, operating system, and compute power. Significantly, the differences contribute to performance overall and web components rendering, like images, texts, and videos across various devices. Another critical point to keep in mind is that most users of mobile devices are not connected to a high-speed network most of the time, thus web pages, such as in PHP web application development for instance should be designed with care to effectively work on low bandwidth connections.

Tips to Scale a Website for Various Mobile Devices

1. Adapting to any screen size. A web page at the very least has to be scaled to fit the different sizes of devices. Mobiles these days come with extremely high screen resolutions. On mobiles, the pixel density is considerably higher compared to desktop screens.

Thus, formatting a page to match the screen width of mobile devices in device-independent pixels is critical. Check this out.

In the above example, the meta viewport value helps in formatting the whole HTML page and rendering content to match any size of the screen.

2. Responsive images. The design must take into consideration small, handheld devices, which operate in areas with low signal. Complex graphics and big photos are not suitable for mobiles that operate under such conditions. Mobile app development providers like eTatvaSoft, such as designers must ensure that the images used in websites are optimized for various pixel densities and viewports sizes.

Resolution switching is highly recommended wherein it’s possible to instruct a browser to choose and use the appropriate image file size, depending on the device’s screen size. Switching image in accordance with the resolution is done using a couple of attributes, namely, srcset and sizes. With these, the browser would utilize the width of the device to choose the media condition provided in the sizes list that’s most suitable, select the slot size based on the condition, and load the image referenced in the srcset, which matches closely to the slot size selected.

3. Content is the King. When it comes to website development, designers should keep in mind that content must determine the website design and not vice versa. A site that has too many elements, such as charts, forms, tables, and others gets to be a challenge when scaled on mobile. Developers could end up hiding content for mobile users, making the mobile and desktop versions inconsistent.

The design goal should be focused on the content and core structure, instead of integrating the website’s decorative elements. Designers, as recommended by the mobile-first method must ascertain a single content version for mobile users and desktop users. Thus, web designers should carefully optimize, consider, and create content that would satisfy not only the goals of the business but also appeals to mobile users.

4. The video that plays all the time. Video files typically won’t play on mobile devices if formats are not supported, or if they need a proprietary video player. It’s recommended to utilize standard HTML5 tags for animations and videos. For loading, decoding, and playing videos on a website, the HTML5 video element could be used.

It’s highly recommended to produce a video in several formats to fit various mobile platforms. Furthermore, the appropriate sizing of videos so they would play within their containers is vital. See this example.

5. Responsive Tables. Today, the world is extremely data-driven. Bringing time-sensitive and critical data to handheld devices gives much freedom and power for decision-making to consumers. The challenge is presenting data to a user in a way that loads and reads easily on a mobile device.

Data most often must be presented in table form, but if data tables get unwieldy or too big, interpreting on a small screen mobile device could be frustrating. There are various approaches to creating responsive tables, the most important is the following:

Conclusion

A website that’s well-designed and works and scales well on small devices always could be improved progressively to work on bigger devices.

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