Best practice in web design

Before you create a website, you should consider the technical issues relating to web design, specifically:

• browser compatibility
• screen resolutions
• web technologies
• internet speed

Browser issues

Web pages should be able to display across different browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Edge (successor to Internet Explorer), Safari and Opera.

When building your site, test your web pages for browser compatibility issues in as many browsers and operating systems as you can. Remember to test on most recent browser versions, as well as the older ones - not all of your visitors may be using up-to-date software.

If you are updating an existing site, use web analytics tools to see what browsers your customers are currently using to access your website.

Screen resolutions

According to Statcounter, GlobaStats, the most common screen resolution sizes in recent years have been:

• 1366x768 pixels for desktops
• 375x667 pixels for mobile screens
• 768x1024 pixels for tablets

Higher resolutions, such as 1920x1080 pixels for desktops and 414x896 for mobiles, have gained in popularity over the last year. It's important to consider these sizes carefully. If you design your website for higher resolutions, some low-resolution screens and older devices may not be able to display all of your content. Read about mobile web design best practices.

Download speeds

Not all internet users have high-speed access, so connection speed should also influence your webpage design. Research suggests that:

• nearly half of web users expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less
• 40 per cent of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load

Too many images or rich media - such as animations or video - will slow down the speed at which your webpage loads. This can result in your customers leaving the site. Since page speed is a ranking factor, slow speeds can also hurt your search ranking.

Try to keep file and image sizes to a minimum. For context, the average size of a desktop web page in 2022 was 2286.3KB and of a mobile web page was 2006.6KB. (Source: HTTP Archive data)

Technology

Some web technologies can prevent users from viewing your site or affect indexing of your website by search engines. These include:

• HTML frames
• Javascript
• Flash
• AJAX

If using these technologies, consider the potential risks to the usability and accessibility of your website. See more on web accessibility issues and learn how to design a user-friendly website.