Effective options for reducing website loading time

woman enjoying web content

Here at Pumpkin Web Design, we are Preston’s leading web design and web marketing professionals. We provide valuable web design, SEO, and marketing solutions to a range of clients, across the North West, including Southport and Wigan, as well as Manchester. As a result, we have produced this guide to everything you need to know about reducing your website loading time.

Why is it important to keep website loading time short?

The loading speed of your website is important for a number of reasons, including:

  • Providing a positive user experience- users have expectations of any website they use. And the loading speed is one of those expectations. In fact, users expect your website to load in 2 seconds or less. With an estimated 40% of potential customers leaving your website if it does not load within 3 seconds. So if you want to keep your users happy, reducing the time your website takes to load is essential.
  • Effective for SEO- Search engines build their fortune by providing positive outcomes for users. This means showing the very best results for search queries. They determine this using a variety of ranking factors, and loading speed is one of these factors. This means that if you want your website to rank highly on search engines like Google, you need to make sure your website loads faster.

What are the effective options for reducing website loading time?

So, what can you do to make sure your website loads faster? And how can you make sure it takes less than 2 seconds? Well, there are a number of things you can do, including:

  • Remember that speed is an illusion- if your users are staring at a completely blank screen, or a loading icon, for 2 seconds or more, this is going to feel like longer because there is nothing to distract them. But, if you load the above the fold content, like a hero image earlier than the rest of the page, then your load time will feel a whole lot shorter. Users like to see an almost immediate response, so they know their command is being processed.
  • Optimise your images- naturally larger images take longer to load. But you do need to use large images throughout your website, and these need to be high quality too. So what can you do? Well, you can compress your images so that the size is greatly reduced, but the quality of the image is not effected negatively. This means your website will still look great, but will load a lot faster.

For more information and advice about web marketing, SEO and website loading speed, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design.

Pumpkin Web Design Ltd is a small and highly results driven digital agency working for like minded clients in Preston, Chorley, Southport, Blackburn, Burnley, Morecambe,Wigan, Manchester, London, Warrington, Blackpool, Lancaster, Leyland, Lytham St Annes, Bolton, Chester and the UK. Our services include web design, SEO, content marketing, video production, brand design and much more.