As the name “mobile first” it means that the website is going to be designed for mobile first and then progressively enhance the design for larger screens like tablets, laptops, desktop monitors and other bigger screens. This approach results in the best optimization of the design and the content of a website. By adopting this approach we can provide the best user experience to the users whether they are using any device.
Advantages of the “Mobile first design” approach:
Improved user experience: Mobile-first design prioritizes the most important content on the smaller screens, which ensures that users have a positive experience on any device. This leads to better engagement, and increased user satisfaction and eventually benefits the website.
Optimized website and its content: By adopting the mobile-first design approach the programmer optimizes the image size, reduce code and can minimize the file size which reduces the load time and increase the performance of the website.
Better SEO: Search engines prioritize the websites which are optimized according to the UX (User experience). And as we have discussed, optimization eventually grabs more traffic on the website and eventually leads to more benefits.
Simplified CSS: Mobile first design requires a streamlined CSS code, which makes it easier to maintain and update the website.
Increased reach: As we know that the number of mobile users is growing so making giving the best user experience on the mobile phone is a need so the website reaches a larger audience.
As we have seen some of the advantages this is not all the stuff we got. There are more advantages and there are some disadvantages too for adopting the mobile-first approach:
Limited screen space: With the mobile-first design approach we develop the website for the smallest screen first. Which means we get limited screen space while developing.
Compromised website content: Sometime we can’t make possible to show all the content on the smaller screen so we need to make the UI a little bit more complex to show the content.
These are some of the disadvantages/cons of opting for the mobile-first design approach. But when it comes to practical projects it depends on the target audience of the website.
Ex- Let us suppose we are going to sell some online courses which can hardly be done using a mobile phone, like a programming course. So there is no point in opting for the mobile-first design approach. Although we need to make the website mobile responsive too so that users can watch some of the content which they need and can't access on their laptops or bigger screen devices.
Or
We might be making a “Note” taking web app. And for that, both mobile and laptop users are equally important to us.
Conclusion – There is no straightforward answer to adopt the ‘mobile-first design’ approach or not. The end decision must be taken based on the target audience.