When it comes to your website, the load speed can be a critical component. Your users will expect your website to load almost as soon as the link is clicked on. While at the same time, Google itself uses load speed to determine where to rank a website. With faster websites ranking higher than those that take just a few seconds longer. As a result, tweaking aspects of your web design to make sure your website is loading quickly and efficiently, is essential for your success online. And here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we work with clients and companies around the Manchester region, to provide web design solutions that not only grab attention and look great, but that load quickly too. And this is our guide to web design tricks to reduce load speed.
Load speed and user expectations
Website load speed is an essential part of your website performance. And this is for two reasons. First of all, your users expect a short loading time. And secondly, it can affect your website ranking on the SERP. So let’s take a look at user expectations.
Web design should always be centred around meeting the needs and expectations of the users. Just like your business or company provides a service, so does your website. And if you wouldn’t be happy to keep customers waiting in the real world, you shouldn’t accept it in the digital one either.
Users generally access your website from one of two places: social media, or a search engine. But wherever they come from, your website visitors are looking for information. And it’s up to you to provide this information, through original and interesting content, in the shortest space of time as possible. While navigation bars and options will make this easier, the initial load speed is the single most important factor. Just check out this info-graphic from Crazy Egg:
Load speed and the SERP
Because search engines also want to provide the best possible experience for users, they too use speed to determine the quality of the interaction with your website. A website that takes too long to load, equates to a website that does not provide a top quality user experience. And despite the actual page content, this can be enough to cause your website to lose out on a higher ranking position on the SERP.
Web design tricks to reduce load speed
So how can you reduce the time it takes to load your website, and keep your company performing well online? Well, here are some tried and tested web design tricks to reduce load speed:
- Optimise images- One of the easiest things you can do to reduce your load time is to optimise your images. Images take longer to load than a block of text, but without images, your page would be pretty boring, and definitely wouldn’t succeed. So this means that you need to keep the images, but optimise them in terms of size and resolution. Some web designers will take a really large image, and then scale it down using CSS. This means that the image will still be high quality, just smaller. However, it also means that the website has to load a much larger image than necessary. And this can take up most of your loading time. Instead, you could scale the images before uploading them. Or alternatively, use a compressor. This will reduce the size but keep the quality.
- Enabling compression- Compressing your website can reduce the file size by up to 75%! Which is a huge amount of data that won’t need to be loaded at all, leading to an almost instant loading time. However, this is handled on the server side, and so it will depend on your server host as to what they can offer you.
- Optimising CSS- If you can’t compress your website, why not optimise the CSS instead? The CSS loads, before the website. So the less time the CSS takes to load, means the less time that users have to spend waiting for your website to show up. You can minimise your CSS and get rid of any superfluous code, or empty spaces. Or you can compress it using free tools online.
- Priotise carefully- Javascript files can be loaded after your website. But many designers still put it in front of the content. Which means that a user has to wait for all the javascript files to load, before they can see your website. And this can really add the seconds onto the website loading time. A simple way to decrease your loading time is to simply re-arrange your code, considering your top priorities first. You can also use “defer” and “async” options to reduce load time.
For more information or advice, get in touch with Manchester’s leading web design professionals today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.