Why Developers Should Embrace Progressive Enhancement

Mobile devices are growing in usage worldwide. People are buying more smartphones — and tablets — each and every year. Moreover, people are using their mobile devices more and more to access the web. It’s important to take the web experience on a mobile device into account. It’s important today and it will be even more important tomorrow as the number of users is constantly increasing. Progressive enhancement is a philosophy that makes sure that people have an easy access to your information, no matter their device; because it focuses on how you build your website.

The philosophy of progressive enhancement

During the 00’s, it was common to design for the latest and greatest browsers first. It’s a concept called graceful degradation, which means that you would first build for the newest browsers with the newest technological supports. Then you would dumb down the website for the browsers that were not as powerful and not as supportive. This is a top-down approach where on the top you have the greatest and latest browsers. You then go down the list of less and less capable browsers and make sure the site works as well with them as it can.

Mobile web design

Progressive enhancement was created to support mobile browsers. They are mostly inferior to current desktop browsers so it’s easier to ensure they support the content with progressive enhancement rather than graceful degradation. Here are some statistics to give you a clearer picture of the current state of mobile devices, and how having a mobile-friendly site can improve your business:

No one screen size has more than 20% of the market share. – Mobify Research

25.85% of all emails are opened on mobile phones, and 10.16% are opened on tablets. – Knotice

61% of customers who visit a mobile unfriendly site are likely to go to a competitor’s site – Yahoo Small Business Advisor

Over 1.2 billion people access the web from their mobile devices. – Trinity Digital Marketing

Global mobile traffic now accounts for 15% of all Internet traffic. – Internet Trends Report

62% of companies which designed their website(s) for mobile platforms increased their sales and 64% of companies that designed their website for tablets increased sales. – Ironpaper

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