Design your way

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Take a few moments to think about how you go about search for different things on the internet. If a website takes too long to load, how quick are you to close out that particular tab and open up a new search engine result?

How likely are you to return to a website that takes a while to load if you are searching for something along the lines of local news stories or weather reports?

If you are trying to run errands and look at your mobile device at the same time, what amount of patience are you likely to have when it comes to potentially having to endure long loading times depending on your location when you are trying to perform certain online tasks? Let’s face it: when you don’t have a lot of time, your expectations in terms of website performance optimization are likely to increase.

Tips For Improving Site Performance
Image source: Joe Baker

Whenever the topic of website performance is discussed, a number of terms can emerge that can sound rather geeky or nerdy. These terms (minifying, DNS lookups, etc.) are ones that likely will not catch the attention of individuals who are not very tech-savvy.

This translates into the misconception that website performance is an issue that only developers should be concerned with since they have a great deal of technical knowledge.

Here are a few useful website performance tips to keep in mind

a few useful website performance tips
Image source: Blake Wilton

If there is a serious delay, then this is something that can generally interrupt the train of thought of the user. It will ultimately ultimately lead to a negative user experience. Your web page is not required to load within this time frame, however.

Concentrate on satisfying all of the demands of your users by offering many different options. Most people usually don’t have a few extra minutes to spare, so they will find this move to be very useful.

Do everything you can to ensure that download speed is as quick as possible. If the download speed is too slow, users will likely not stick around your website for very long.

There are a few things that should be considered whenever you want to develop a new website:

  • Layout
  • Hierarchy
  • Intuitiveness
  • Ease of use
  • Speed

The overall experience of your website will determine how much your audience actually trusts your brand, as well as returning to your website in the future and sharing it with other people that they know.

The large part of this user experience includes not just page load time, but also how your page itself feels. Both of these aspects need to be weighed equally with all of the other aesthetics of your website.

A spectacular design is useless if it doesn’t load fast

A spectacular design is useless if it doesn't load fast
Image source: Justas Galaburda

Creating a website that loads as quickly as possible is typically priority number one for any website designer. It is also the top rule that really any designer should follow.

While you may have a spectacular design for your website, not many people will be able to see it if it takes too incredibly long to load. Always take the time to think about how long it will take for your website to load.

Compress images

Compress images
Image source: Amorn

Images are what typically take up most of the downloaded bytes, as well as a significant amount of space on a page. However, optimizing images can also help a great deal as well.

Whenever a browser has less bytes to download, there will be less competition for a client’s bandwidth, which means that the browser can download and display things much quicker. A website will load much faster whenever images are used in a lesser capacity, even though they do greatly enhance a page.

Use web fonts instead of image icons

Instead of using PNG icons, try using a webfont for your icons. The most important thing about icon fonts is that they scale. No matter what size you want for them, they will meet your demands.

If you aren’t a fan of Photoshop, than this will make you happy. With icon fonts, you won’t need any work to be done in PS. No more “saving for web” a lot of icons.

And most importantly, their speed is what matters most. They’re fast and image icons don’t even compare to them.

Heavy sites are not mobile-friendly

Example of a good site for mobile
Example of a good site for mobile: David Boyero

Whenever you resize the browser when designing a website, you get the impression that it is mobile-friendly. However, if you think that responsive web design is your only goal and solution in terms of mobile, you stand to lose a great deal of money. If a website takes longer than five seconds to load, approximately 74% of all mobile users will end up leaving that website.

Before you check on the final design of your website, take the opportunity to check out its total load time. There are many different services that you can take advantage of for this, which can provide an analysis of your website, oftentimes for free. Even if you have to use one of these services repeatedly, it will be well worth it in the end.

A few website performance testing tools

Google PageSpeed

Google PageSpeed

This service works to analyze your website before giving it a rating out of 100 for both desktop and mobile. You will also be provided with suggestions on how to make improvements where they are needed.

Pingdom

Pingdom

This is a service that tests the total load time of all objects of a website. You will also be able to improve any slow-loading elements, as well as view various reports.

Gmetrix

Gmetrix

GTmetrix gives you insight on how well your site loads and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimize it.



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