Prioritizing Performance in Responsive Design
Brad Frost takes a look at performance and reviews some options you have. These shouldn’t be considered retrofit options at the end of the project, you need to bake these into your process from the beginning.
Last year, Guy Podjarny ran tests on hundreds of responsive sites on Mediaqueri.es and found that a full 86% of responsive sites send about the same hefty payload to small screens as they do to large screens. In other words, mobile users are downloading desktop-sized sites. Not good.
He ran the tests again this year and found that a few more responsive sites’ small views weigh less than their large screen counterparts. This may seem like progress, but Guy also mentioned that page weight overall is on the rise, so in my eyes any victory is quickly negated by overall page size increase.
An excerpt from Prioritizing Performance in Responsive Design
