Accessibility / 29 Jan 2014
Optimising Front End Performance for Mobile Devices
Most front-end developers will be familiar with at least some of the options available to them when it comes to enhancing front end performance. Performance in this sense is not referring to the speed at which a given page loads, but instead how smooth and responsive it feels when a user interacts with it. A specific example would be the frame rate a user experiences when scrolling down your home page; if it’s consistently high, then performance is considered good.
There is a chance you may not have experienced a need to address performance issues before. Maybe you haven’t worked on a site that has suffered from such issues, or maybe removing that small bit of lag or recovering those dropped frames just isn’t at the top of your priorities. Either way, with the increasing amount of animation and complex styles being built into modern websites coupled with the adaptation of responsive design, there is a high chance you’ll run into sluggish mobile performance at some point. This article will suggest a few things to consider when working on websites and web apps that need to balance complexity and performance when running on less powerful mobile devices.