Source: Adfero, 23 April 2012

A new study has revealed that many websites are poorly optimised for use with mobile phones and may actually cause battery power to drain away.

Researchers from Stanford University in California said that while the majority of sites are designed to look good and work quickly, little consideration is given to saving battery power.

This, the authors say, is not just frustrating for consumers whose phones run out of battery, but it could also compromise levels of site traffic.

From their experiments, the researchers found HTML to be a much less energy-hungry option to running Javascript and CSS, while JPEG is the optimal picture format for Android handsets.

"We hope this paper demonstrates the importance of building a mobile site optimised for mobile devices," the authors concluded.

"Sites who do not, end up draining the battery of visiting phones. This can potentially reduce traffic to the site."

Over 50 per cent of people in the UK now own a smartphone, of which half run Android.