- Do Consider Your Content
- Don't Give Mobile Users the "Mobile Treatment"
- Do Serve Correct Assets
- Don't Serve Everything to Everyone
- Do Go Mobile First with CSS
- Don't Add Every Resolution as a Breakpoint
- Do Go Fluid, Fixed, or Mixed
- Don't Use a Framework if You Don't Need One
- Do Analyze and Optimize
- Don't Ignore Your Users
Do Analyze and Optimize
You should be doing everything you can to give users the fastest and most native experience possible with your design. You should note that actual speed and perceived speed are two separate but incredibly important things. When your site loads fully loads in three seconds, if a user can’t start interacting with it or at least see a portion of it in one second, they may think your site is having issues and move to another.
You can check your site statistics with Google Analytics, Adobe Omniture, Woopra, or even some open source solutions like Piwik. No matter the solution you decide to implement, you should start immediately to check your results and then perform A/B testing to decide how to iterate changes that make an impact for the better.
You can increase your site speed with content delivery networks and services such as CloudFlare, MaxCDN, Akami, and Limelight. Some of these leverage the wonderful PageSpeed project that can help you deal with critical path rendering, image optimization, and the minification and combination of CSS and JavaScript files. If you have an Operations or DevOps team that will work with you, see if they can get PageSpeed running on your Apache or Nginx server.