How To Build Websites For Safari Ecosystem [Quick Guide]

Facebook Twitter Reddit Pinterest

So you’re thinking of building websites for the Safari ecosystem, but you’re not sure how to get started? This post is just for you then.

We could go into the technical details but when it comes to making sure that your websites are optimized for Safari’s mobile view, or any Apple devices for that matter, there are a few simple hacks.

Let’s cut to the chase.

Here’s what you want to know when it comes to building websites for Safari.

How to Build Websites For Safari Ecosystem [Quick Guide] 1

Quick Navigation

Keep Your Design Simple

Since you’re building websites for the Safari browser, you want to keep your designs and layout pretty simple. Just a few columns, a footer and a sidebar, are enough to get started.

Don’t use too many nested elements for your markup code and use unordered and ordered lists to create your menus.

Save the styling for the CSS section and design just the structure of your webpages with HTML.

Write & Test On Safari

This is a no-brainer hack, but if you’re building for Safari, you want to write your code and test it on Safari.

You can even use a Safari emulator for this purpose. Safari and Chrome use the Webkit rendering engine for displaying web pages.

Now you could write on Opera or Internet Explorer, but when you test your website on Safari and Chrome, you’ll notice there are a few elements amiss.

Must Read- 4 Ways You Can Factory Reset iPhone without Password

To avoid that, just write for Safari in the first place and test it on that browser. Safari webpages are best displayed on iPads, iPods, tablets and Apple devices.

Use A Code Validator

Using a code validator online tool and running your website through it before hitting publish will save you so much time and prevent headaches.

You can use the W3C Markup Validation Service and the CSS Validation Service to get this done. You can spot errors when you validate your code and make debugging go a lot quicker.

Make Use Of CSS Reset Rules

Although it’s true that you’re writing for Safari, you also want to make sure your websites display correctly on other browsing ecosystems.

The CSS gets reset for your website files depending on the browser you’re testing on. A good way to prevent this is by resetting the CSS to defaults and adjusting the values from there.

You can read Eric Meyer’s post on CSS Reset Rules and why you should reset your CSS. It’s a literal life hack, and we recommend it.

Use Browser Compatibility Checks

Another surefire way to make sure your websites work on Safari and are loading the way you want is to use cross-browser testing tools.

Lambda Test has a fantastic online tool that lets you test your website on different platforms.

One major advantage you’d get from using LambdaTest is that you can take automated screenshots and get full-page views of your website, thus letting you compare what you see across different web browsers and devices simultaneously.

You can even run your site through virtual machines, real devices and many more browsing environments to make sure it’s compatible with Safari and various ecosystems. It makes your job a lot easier.

Must Read- How to Secure PDF File or a Document

Cross-browser compatibility testing will also let you identify any visual bugs, errors in code and see if it compiles and runs correctly.

For your website to work well on mobile browsers, you can use safari mobile emulator to see how it performs on the premier Apple browser.

Use The Latest Web Standards

To avoid any design pitfalls, write your code using the latest technology frameworks like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

This sounds basic but can get overlooked by web developers. You can learn about the latest web standards by visiting the W3C Schools website.

Optimize Your SEO

One of the best practices when it comes to building websites not just for Safari but any web browsers is optimizing the SEO.

You want Google to be able to crawl and index your page so that it ranks high in SERP results.

Using the Google Analytics tool will give you insights on where your most website traffic is coming from and which parts of the pages the bounce rates are the highest.

Google has a free SEO checker that will also tell you what’s wrong with your SEO.

Disable Plugins & Extensions

If you’ve written any lines of code that talks about adding plugins or extensions to your Safari webpages, disable them.

Safari doesn’t support loading plugins for running animations, video, and audio content. And while you’re at it, disable Flash too.

Use the <video> and <audio> tags instead for displaying any media content, within your lines of code.

Compress Your Images & Visual Content

If you’re uploading a lot of videos, graphics and interactive animations for your website and your visitors can’t seem to load them up, it’s probably because of the file sizes.

Must Read- How to Install Google Duo For PC

Using a file size compressor will help you out with this. Compressed videos and media files on websites load up a lot more efficiently.

And yes, this isn’t tied directly to coding, but when it comes to website performance, it makes a huge difference.

Enable Safari’s Web Developer Feature

This is probably our final tip for the day.

The coding environment you choose to write your code in, it’s going to influence your productivity as a developer.

You can use the web developer tools built-into Safari for writing your code, but if you’re looking for a dedicated coding environment, you can try out Moodle.

The Web Inspector tool in Safari is another option, and there is a Responsive design mode feature that makes it easy to create very mobile-responsive experiences for websites. You can read more about them here.

Conclusion

That’s pretty much it.

These tips will get you moving in the right direction when building websites for Safari. It’s not about just writing code but the way you optimize the whole browsing experience.

Hopefully, now you’ll get a clearer picture of what and what not to do before diving deep into coding for Safari.

Suggested –