A study done by PhoCusWright Inc. found that 57% of online consumers will abandon a site after waiting three seconds for a page to load. 80% of these people will not return, and of these almost half will go on to tell others about their negative experience.
Although responsive web design is something that has become more common among websites, there have been issues with slow performance, which is why users will leave the site so soon. One reason this happens is because some responsive sites deliver all content regardless of what device it is being viewed on. According to Guypo,-a web performance researcher, “86% of responsive websites still download full desktop pages to mobile devices”. Making sure that only important resources are being delivered to the device is an important thing to consider. Tools such as Compass and UglifyJS can be used to solve this. Conditional loading is also an important technique that can be helpful with speeding up responsive websites.
Images usually use up a large amount of kilobytes in a web page. An easy fix for images that perform poorly on mobile devices is Adaptive Images. Adaptive Images delivers smaller images to smaller devices. Another tool that can be used for headlines that are inadequately displayed on mobile devices is FitText, which makes font sizes flexible.
Why have a responsive site if it has these problems? Using responsive design is the best way to design for mobile. It creates a uniform experience, and it’s better to be as innovative as possible especially in this time of social sharing mania.
PhoCus Wright – Consumer Response to Travel Site Performance (2010)