Achieving A Mobile-first Website- PHP Development
For every web development services provider, it is important to focus on a mobile-first website.
Why?
Let’s understand the core and scope of a mobile-first approach for your next project.
A mobile-first approach is majorly focused on mobile users. Ever since the usage of smartphones has exceeded desktop usage for browsing, major search engines like Google have started targeting mobile audiences. For SERPs, Google has enforced multiple algorithms that websites have to follow for top rankings.
Now when I’ve interrelated SEO/SERPs to mobile devices, almost everyone reading this article has understood the importance of a mobile-first website. Apart from enhanced search engine rankings, what else can we achieve with this approach?
- By capturing mobile traffic, we can widen our audience.
- As users will browse on mobile devices, it becomes easy to share our content with others.
- We become easily approachable.
- All-in-all, great user experiences leading to a raise in our business revenue is the outcome of a mobile-first approach to web development services.
“A mobile-first Approach with PHP”
PHP (or Hypertext Preprocessor) is an open-source language for developers to build web applications. We can use this language for eCommerce, core PHP custom development, CMS, and framework development. No matter which category we’re incorporating PHP, it is imperative to make it mobile-friendly.
How can a PHP development company or expert follow a mobile-first approach?
Content Optimization
Apparently, mobile screens don’t offer much space, unlike desktops. That means we don’t have the leverage to add every single detail of the desktop version of our PHP website. Because of restricted horizontal scrolling on a mobile screen, we need to take extra care of the font size and style of the text.
This part can be easily handled while developing website themes in PHP. We can define and select the optimum style for the content and its font respectively. Here, the size is more crucial than the style. Because our text must be readable from the smaller screens of mobile devices.
All-in-all, you don’t comprise the webpage content. You just relocate the content on the small screens.
Image Optimization
Just like text, optimizing the images for smaller screens contributes towards achieving a mobile-first website in PHP. Be it the default or landscape orientation of a smartphone, the screen space varies hugely from desktops.
For most poorly built websites, the images lose their pixel quality and displace from the desired position on smartphones. This is a major reason for losing potential users who fail to access your website at their ease.
At the time of website theme development, make sure you’re prioritizing mobile UX over desktop one. Make mobile CSS ready in first place instead of following desktop designs first and altering it to look mobile-oriented.
Speed Optimization
Another challenge for smaller screens of mobile devices is the page load times. As a website built for desktops is heavy in size, it will take longer to load on smartphones. Therefore, every PHP development company should optimize it for speed so that it will provide the same user experiences across different screen sizes.
If we’re following the above-mentioned strategies (content and image optimization), some of the speed-related issues are already fixed. Apart from that, there are always custom speed optimization techniques such as optimizing PHP scripts, caching processes, etc.
If you’re not a PHP expert, it is always recommended to seek assistance from proven professionals with hands-on experience in PHP development and optimization.
Testing for Responsiveness
Whenever we’re ready with our PHP application, it is important to conduct responsiveness tests along with other testing processes. There are numerous readily available tests available to check the mobile-friendliness. To name a few, Google’s Search Console and Mobile Friendly Test by Chrome are two most popular and reputed online tools.
When we run mobile-friendly tests on these tools, we get the current level of mobile-friendliness of our website. Moreover, there will be a list of recommendations on fixing the issues hampering the app’s responsiveness.
Key Takeaways
Making web applications mobile-friendly is of utmost importance. In today’s smartphone-driven world, no business can succeed without performing accurately on these platforms. In this post, I’ve provided the basic and crucial aspects of mobile optimization. All three areas, i.e., content, image, and speed, can be trained for mobile responsiveness during the theme development process.
If you’re performing best tips and tricks for these areas, you can save a lot of effort required at later stages of web development. For any suggestions or tips, feel free to contact me.
