There is a gap between how a website is built and how it is used. It is built on a laptop, on office broadband, by someone who already knows where everything is. It is used on a mid-range Android phone, on mobile data, by someone who has never seen the site before and is paying for every megabyte.

Closing that gap is mostly unglamorous work, and it matters more than almost any design decision.

Images are almost always the problem

A photograph straight off a phone camera can be several megabytes. Put six of those on a homepage and you have built a page that costs a patient real money to open and takes an uncomfortable while to appear.

Three fixes, in order of impact:

  • Resize before upload. An image displayed at 800 pixels wide does not need to be 4000 pixels wide. This alone usually removes most of the weight.
  • Use a modern format. WebP produces substantially smaller files than JPEG at the same visual quality, and every browser in current use supports it.
  • Load below-the-fold images lazily, so the phone only fetches what the visitor scrolls to.

Fonts and scripts cost more than they look

Every custom font weight is a separate download. A site loading four weights of two font families is fetching eight files before a word appears. Two weights of one family is almost always enough.

The same applies to scripts. Chat widgets, analytics, social embeds, sliders and animation libraries each add weight, and on a slow connection they compete with the content for bandwidth. Ask of each one whether a patient would miss it. Most would not.

Test the way patients experience it

In Chrome, open developer tools, go to the network tab, and set throttling to a slow connection. Then load your homepage and watch. This is closer to your patients' reality than anything you will see on office wifi.

Better still, borrow a colleague's older phone and use the site on mobile data. The things you notice in five minutes of that are usually more actionable than any automated report.

Design decisions that help

Tap targets need to be large enough for a thumb. Text needs to be readable without pinching. Forms need the right keyboard, so a phone number field brings up the number pad. A phone number should be tappable to dial. None of this is advanced, and all of it is routinely missed.

Avoid designs that depend on hovering, because there is no hover on a touchscreen, and avoid horizontal scrolling, which almost always means a fixed-width element escaped its container.

What good looks like

A patient on mobile data should see readable content quickly, be able to find your location and services without pinching or hunting, and be able to complete a booking form one-handed. That is the whole standard, and most healthcare sites in Nigeria fail it not through incompetence but because nobody ever tested under real conditions.