7 best practices for designing browser-friendly websites

The primary advantage of building a cross-browser website is the ability to reach a broader audience. If your web page works well across all browsers, you'll cover the needs and expectations of your audience equally. This potentially results in more sales, engagement, and user trust.

Users expect websites to behave the same regardless of how they access them. Multi-browser compatibility ensures that layouts, forms, navigation, and all content perform consistently. When a website displays differently in one browser compared to another, this leads to confusion and frustration, causing the user to leave. That's why you require consistency.

If you want your website to get a positive response from search engines, you'll have to offer a smooth and accessible experience. Optimizing your website uniformly across browsers will prevent layout shifts, broken links, and script errors — all aspects that can hurt your SEO. A clean code with consistent performance signals to search engines that your website is a reliable source, potentially improving rankings.

A well-built cross-browser website contributes to a more accessible web. Assistive technologies like screen readers depend on semantic HTML and consistent structure. When compatibility issues are eliminated, it ensures that people with disabilities receive the same experience, regardless of the browser they use. This also supports legal compliance with accessibility standards like the WCAG.

Following modern web standards ensures your website won't be outdated tomorrow. New browser versions are released frequently, so websites relying on deprecated features risk breaking with future updates. Cross-browser development involves building solutions for scalability and ensuring your resource works as intended during any update.

Using semantic HTML5 and CSS3 ensures your code is readable, accessible, and widely supported. Standards-compliant code avoids outdated elements and reduces the odds of rendering errors in lesser-used browsers. This also makes maintenance and updates easier, improving long-term project sustainability and simplifying collaboration across development teams.

Designing for mobile-first means starting with the smallest screen size and adding features for larger viewports. This approach ensures excellent performance on mobile devices and builds a natural progression toward the desktop. It's essential for creating device-independent interfaces and aligns with today's usage trends, where mobile typically dominates web traffic.

Check out the key UI/UX design steps outlined by our expert designers at Dworkz. You'll see how the process works and why certain principles are mandatory in design.

Browsers apply default styling rules that vary significantly, which can create inconsistent designs. CSS resets like Normalize.css remove those irregularities, creating a level starting point for styling. This step is essential to ensure visual consistency, especially for typographic elements, form controls, and spacing.

Our expert design team shares more tips in our SaaS UI/UX design best practices guide. Follow the link to learn more about the principles used at Dworkz and how they can help your business.

Some CSS features may not be fully supported in all browsers without vendor-specific prefixes. Including prefixes like -webkit-, -moz-, and -ms- ensures broader compatibility for experimental & newer styles. While prefixing is becoming less common as standards solidify, it remains important when working with animations, transitions, and flexbox layouts.

Rather than guessing browser behavior via user-agent strings, feature detection checks whether a browser supports a specific capability before using it. Libraries like Modernizr help implement this strategy. It allows your website to adapt its functionality without assumptions, resulting in fewer bugs and more resilient code.

Progressive enhancement begins with a functional core experience using HTML and CSS, then layers on advanced features using JavaScript. This guarantees usability for older or less capable browsers while enhancing experiences for modern ones. It's a future-proofing approach that ensures accessibility and functionality remain intact under any conditions.

Cross-browser testing isn't a one-time task. It should be conducted during all development stages. Use real devices and cloud platforms to evaluate how your website renders and performs. Catching issues early helps maintain consistent UX, ensures accessibility, and minimizes costly bug fixes after launch.

Understanding your audience is the first step in determining how much effort should go into legacy support. Use analytics platforms like Google Analytics to monitor the browsers most commonly used by your visitors. If a significant portion still uses Internet Explorer or older versions of Edge and Safari, you may need to accommodate them. If the numbers are negligible, you can allocate resources more efficiently.

When supporting legacy browsers, use a strategy of graceful degradation. This means that advanced features should not break core functionality. Avoid heavy CSS animations and modern JavaScript APIs that lack support. Instead, design a solid and clean HTML/CSS structure that remains usable even without enhancements while maintaining key UX aspects like navigation and readability.

Polyfills and shims act as bridges between modern code and older browser capabilities. You can use libraries like core-js, Babel, and Polyfill.io to integrate newer JavaScript syntax and features while maintaining backward compatibility. This lets you build using modern tools and still reach older environments without rewriting your entire codebase.

Let's take a closer look at both paid and free cross-browser testing tools that you can use:

• Playwright (free): an open-source tool from Microsoft for end-to-end testing, supporting headless mode and real device emulation;

• BrowserStack ($39/month): a cloud-based service offering real-time browser testing on thousands of device-browser combinations;

• LambdaTest ($15/month): provides manual and automated testing across 3,000+ environments, also integrating with CI/CD tools;

• SauceLabs ($39/month): helps you get a secure and scalable testing environment for both mobile & desktop browsers, the best choice for enterprises;

• Selenium (free): a popular open-source framework for automating browser interactions that's highly customizable.

In most cases, the tools provide similar capabilities, so the choice depends on your QA team's preferences. Many companies use Selenium and its plugins to get everything paid tools offer for free. If you don't know what's best for your project, get in touch with our experts for a consultation.