Linking to documents that provide more information is vital for responsive design websites.
Let’s face it – no-one wants to read all your content for a specific topic on a single web page, or an endless number of web pages, on a mobile screen.
Having a 70-page research report or the terms and conditions of applying for a job as a downloadable PDF is sensible.
But what happens if that document is 15MB in size? First of all, you won’t get it in the university’s new content management system – it has an 8MB limit.
Even then, someone downloading 8MB on a 3G phone is going to be waiting a while to see it. They’ll also be eating into their data allowance at an alarming rate if they have a few of these to download.
Smaller is better
Making the file size of your documents smaller is key to improving your users’ experiences.
Compression can reduce the time documents need to load and cut the cost for those using mobile data.
Not everyone has access to Adobe Acrobat and its PDF resizing capabilities due to the cost. But there are free tools online to solve this issue; one of the best I’ve found is Smallpdf.
You can drag and drop your document from your computer onto its Compress PDF screen and it’ll do the rest. Then simply download the result for your website.
I’ve seen it take documents of 17MB and reduce them to 600KB, a much more palatable size for users. And there’s no loss of quality.
Even if you think your document is small enough not to bother with this, do it anyway. Every little helps with page loading speed and aiding user experience.
Smallpdf also provides many other PDF manipulation services that could prove helpful to you.
Make it easier for your users to access your documents and there’s every chance they will.
