WebGL on a budget: spectacle that still runs on a phone

Creative development lives or dies on the frame budget. At sixty frames per second you have about sixteen milliseconds for everything: layout, scripts and rendering.

Start with tiers

Define at least three device tiers before you write a shader. Each tier gets its own particle count, resolution scale and effects list. The low tier should still feel intentional, never broken.

Do less, beautifully

A few thousand points, additive blending and careful color can feel richer than a heavy scene. Every byte you do not ship is a byte that does not need parsing on a slow phone.

Pause what nobody sees

Stop rendering when the canvas leaves the viewport or the tab is hidden. It sounds obvious, and it is the single biggest battery saving on most creative sites.