3 Simple Ways to Increase Site Speed With Slim Design
By Stacy | Apr 21, 2016 (5 min read)
In today’s instant culture, speed is everything. Yet, many online businesses fail to see the critical value for their company.
According to Google’s 2016 Site Performance,
“website speeds for any e-commerce site should range from 500 milliseconds to 2 seconds at most.”
By optimizing space and improving your site’s speed, you are elevating the value of your user experience (UX) which will, in turn, have a powerful influence on your website’s conversion rates. How do you achieve faster loading speeds? Well, the answer can be found in answering the age-old question, “What do our clients really want?”
Optimize Images for Site Performance
In building a website, online businesses can often get carried away with applying visual elements and effects that will differentiate their site from competitors, but really serve no other functionality to the website. Although interactive sites and elaborate designs can create a unique user experience, they can also slow down your site.
Maintaining high performance involves taking into consideration different design capacities, for example, ensuring that your images are kept to the appropriate sizes. The larger the files, the longer it will take for the webpage to load. Overlooking these critical web design elements can often inadvertently affect your websites speed, in turn affecting your user experience.
Add-Ons
While simplicity is not the deciding factor in website speed, removing excess functionality is. Although additional widgets and plugins might seem beneficial, if they are not essential add-ons, they will ultimately slow down your site’s speed. Understanding your audience’s needs and interactions with the site is the best way to decide which design elements and add ons to truly incorporate into your website.
Lazy Load
Lazy loading is an easy way to improve site speed, but how does it work.
Otherwise known as above-the-fold-content, lazy loading is when the top of the page section loads faster than the rest of the page. Much like AMP-enabled pages.
For example, let’s imagine you publish a blog post with 15 images. Normally, the page would load only after every image is finished processing.
With Lazy Loading, the content that the user views first will automatically load before anything else on the page. This will vastly reduce load time and make Google and your customers happy.
But wait there’s more!
If you run your site on WordPress, just simply installing and loading a free plugin will automatically force your pages to load lazily.
Looking to improve your website performance? Brandastic is an Orange County-based web-design, digital marketing, advertising, and SEO agency. We can help enhance the look and feel of your website, or build an entirely new platform. Contact us today to see how we can help your business grow.