Best Web Development Practices for Responsive Design

Web applications are different from websites in terms of functionality, but the frontend principles remain the same. Your website needs to adhere to all the best practices of frontend design in your web development process. One of the most important frontend practices to focus on is ensuring responsive behavior of your website. In web development, you must ensure your website is mobile-friendly and responsive. You also need to make sure it is accessible across various devices and browsers and loads quickly.

As a leading Web App Development Company, Megh Technologies adheres to the following principles when creating our web apps. Below, we discuss some of the best practices for web development, specifically targeting responsive web development.

1. A Mobile-First Approach: When developing your frontend, start with a mobile-first approach. Create a UI for small devices, not for a desktop. By designing for mobile, you’ll understand space constraints and prioritize content effectively. Scaling up to a larger screen is easier than removing elements from an existing design. Begin with a simple layout and build upon it for larger screens, ensuring essential content is prioritized on smaller screens.
2. Implement Fluid Layout Elements: Older design practices used pixels as a measurement, which had limitations on smaller devices. Using percentages for measurements is more suitable for responsive designs. REM or EM measurements can also be helpful for a responsive approach.
3. Optimize Media for Responsive Images: For smaller devices, use images that are optimized for size. A 400-pixel-wide screen doesn’t need a 1080-pixel image, as scaling it down wastes resources. Use HTML5’s srcset attribute in image tags to load appropriately sized images for different devices. Also, use max-width: 100% in your CSS to scale images to the container when necessary.
4. Utilize Flexbox and Grid: While div elements work fine, Flexbox and Grid are more versatile and include built-in responsive features. Flexbox is ideal for one-dimensional layouts, while Grid is suitable for two-dimensional layouts. Though they have a learning curve, they offer precise control over complex designs. You can easily resize, wrap, or shift positions based on screen sizes, making them easier to manage than div elements.
5. Strategic Breakpoints: Avoid setting breakpoints based solely on specific devices. Device sizes frequently change, and there are currently over 1,000 different device sizes on the market, making it impractical to create a design for each one. Instead, set breakpoints based on your design. Common breakpoints include small screens (below 600 px), tablets (600-992 px), and desktops (992 px or more). However, you may need additional breakpoints, such as 320-600 px for large smartphones and 992-1800 px for larger screens (excluding televisions). Adjust breakpoints according to how your design appears at different sizes.
6. Use Scalable Typography: When using fonts, avoid using px or pt for sizes. Instead, use relative font sizes like em and rem. Rem is based on the screen size and provides a consistent ratio between screen size and font size. Your CSS media queries can adjust font sizes for different breakpoints, ensuring readability across all devices.
7. Optimize Navigation for Mobile: Navigation can take up a lot of space and, if always visible, may create clutter. It’s best to hide navigational menus unless required. The standard practice for displaying navigation on mobile devices is through a collapsible hamburger menu. Ensure that the hamburger button is large enough to be easily clickable, with enough space around it to prevent accidental clicks. Also, provide a close button if you have a full-screen navigation menu.
8. Use Viewport Meta Tags: Include the HTML code to set the viewport width to the device’s width. Use the HTML code below in the head section of the website : <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> This tag ensures that the website doesn’t scale awkwardly on different devices.
9. Minimize HTTP Requests to Optimize Load Time: Mobile devices access the internet over Wi-Fi and sometimes on slower connections. The number of files downloaded affects load time, so aim to reduce it. Minimize large images, plugins, and scripts. When necessary, use lazy loading to defer non-critical content loading.
10. Show Essential Content First: Display essential content first and hide less crucial information. When dealing with large amounts of content, use accordions and tabs to create sections that use less space on mobile devices while remaining accessible. Whenever possible, use CSS instead of JavaScript for these tasks.
11. Test on Real Devices: Test on real devices when possible, or use emulators if needed. Test across all screen sizes and browsers when possible. Be thorough and ensure that your design adapts well to different devices and screen orientations.
12. Apply Conditional Loading for Mobile Devices: When using platforms like WordPress or Drupal, many files are loaded by default that may not be necessary. For instance, jQuery is loaded on all WordPress sites by default, but if you don’t use it, disable it on the frontend. Remove or conditionally load unused files or those only needed during development but not on deployment. This also applies to CSS files.
13. Ensure Font Size Readability and Accessibility: A minimum font size of 16px is recommended for mobile devices. Besides font size, use an optimal line height to improve readability. Users should not need to zoom in to read the content. Ensure good contrast between text and background colors. Tools like WebAIM’s Contrast Checker can help you meet accessibility standards. Always include descriptive ALT text for images, as it helps screen readers provide information for accessibility purposes.
14. Design Touch-Friendly Elements: When creating buttons and clickable elements, ensure they meet the recommended minimum size of 44×44 pixels. Avoid placing two clickable elements too close together. Adequate spacing between elements prevents accidental taps. A thumb-friendly design on mobile will ensure a better user experience.
15. Responsive Typography and Fluid Scaling: Newer versions of CSS have features like clamp and calc that provide fluid functionality to scale fonts between a minimum and maximum value. Utilize these advanced CSS features when possible to reduce CSS code and improve user experience.
16. Enable Orientation Adjustment: Adjust design layouts for both landscape and portrait orientations on mobile. Make necessary adjustments in font size, images, and element positioning according to the device’s orientation. This is especially important for tablets and mobile devices.
17. Use SVG and Scalable Graphics When Required: Use SVG images whenever possible. SVG files have advantages and disadvantages; they are smaller in size and can be scaled to any size. However, for security, SVG files should be properly secured. Prohibit writing permissions to SVG files and store them in a secure directory.
18. Use Lightweight Fonts and Icons: Where possible, use lightweight fonts and icons. Only include the fonts you need, avoiding loading all font sizes and weights if unnecessary. Font files can consume considerable resources, particularly increasing download time, which can degrade user experience. Avoid large font files and load only the required sizes and weights.
19. Provide Animated Visual Cues When Loading Resources: A white screen is often unpleasant for users. Provide an animated loading cue when resources are being loaded. This gives the user an idea of what is happening so they are not left staring at a blank screen.
20. Prioritize Core Web Vital Stats on Page Speed Insights for Performance: Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights (https://pagespeed.web.dev/) to evaluate your website’s performance. Pay special attention to LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay), and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) metrics for load speed. Address all errors on the page, optimize CSS and JavaScript, and reduce image sizes based on the recommendations.
21. Ensure Your Links Are Crawlable: Web development can become complex quickly, and poor structure can result in pages that are not easily reachable. Create crawlable links within your web pages to help Google efficiently crawl them. Every time a new page is created, notify Google of its presence through a sitemap file.
22. Manually Recrawl Pages When Google Cannot Reach Them: Use Google Webmaster Tools / Google Search Console to prompt Google to crawl URLs that have not been crawled in some time or when page content has changed. Track changes in your files and ensure that Google crawls updated pages regularly.
23. When Creating a Separate Page for Mobile Devices, Use Canonical Tags: Ensure that mobile pages include a canonical tag pointing to the original page. This prevents Google from considering the mobile content as duplicate and ensures that the main (desktop) page retains its SEO value.

Reference :
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/get-started-developers
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/mobile/mobile-sites-mobile-first-indexing
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2012/04/responsive-design-harnessing-power-of
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/canonicalization