Mobile first doesn't just mean a responsive website

Your website might be responsive, but is it really built with mobile devices in mind? Google has moved to a mobile first indexing. They’ve moved to looking at how your site performs on a mobile device over a desktop computer. So when building a website you need to think mobile first. That doesn’t mean just making sure your site scales down to display on a small screen.

Like what I wrote in my previous post, “What happened to caring about website performance?,” you need to really consider performance. Yes, a lot of people do have unlimited data plans, but not everyone. Data speeds have been increasing, but again that all depends on where you are located. Don’t just assume because you have unlimited data and the top data speeds that everyone else does. Think before using that large image (hero image) because it fills the screen on a desktop computer. I’ve seen people using images approaching 1MB and even more in size and more than one in a slider. Talk about a performance hit. What happened to at least knowing about optimizing your images.

From a design perspective, I’d say you need to look at the whole realm of screen sizes and picture how things are going to flow from large screen to small screen and vice versa. Make sure text is readable across devices especially text in images. Can the user touch the link they want without accidently getting the wrong one? How much scroll do I have to do on the page? You don’t want your user to keep swiping and swiping and swiping. Compress your pages depth by putting information in expandable and collapsible elements.

These are some of the things to consider with thinking mobile first. There is more to building a website than the visual design. Just because a site looks good doesn’t mean it does across any screen size, is an efficient site, or makes it easy for the user to find the information they are looking for.