Here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we are Manchester’s leading web design experts. We work with companies in a range of sectors across the North West, including those in Blackburn and Chorley, to provide top quality, effective web design solutions. As a result, we have produced this guide to help you improve your website loading speed.
What are the most effective options for improving website loading speed?
There are several things you can consider during the web design process, that will have an influence on the overall loading speed of your website. These include:
- the size of the images
- the amount of media
- the number of fonts
Image size and website loading speed
When designing your website, you will undoubtedly be focusing on the visual appeal. This will involve images, video, animation, illustration, and a whole host of visual information. But these can take a long time to load, especially if they are not optimised effectively. You should consider:
- Changing the image file size to suit the size you need- Uploading a large image and using CSS to resize this can be effective for responsive web design. But there is often no need for such a large image to be uploaded in the first place. While every device will need a different size image, you can manually scale down the size of the image, to the largest necessary file size, and then use CSS to scale from there. This will take up much less file space, and allow your website to load quickly and easily.
- Compressing images- if you don’t want to worry about manually resizing your images, why not use compression tools instead? This way you can dramatically reduce the image file size, while retaining the high quality result.
- Lazy loading images- this is a practice that is becoming more common with all kinds of websites. Essentially, the user will load the website, and see at first a lower quality image, which will become high quality in just a few seconds. This reduces the amount of time your users will feel like they have been waiting, as the images and content load quickly, before loading in high quality.
The amount of media and website loading speed
If you use a lot of different types of media on your website, especially above the fold, your website users could be waiting longer than they want to, for your website to load. Animated content and video content are the main culprits here, as while these can help you attract the most attention, they also use the most file space and processing power. Embedded media content can also be slow loading, as this will rely on third party communication and processing too. But you cant create an effective website without media, so to speed up your loading times, consider only including the media that will help your website meet conversion goals. You should also consider cutting out any image based clutter on your homepage, as this is the page that will most likely be loading first, so needs to load in the shortest amount of time. An organised homepage can also improve your website performance too.
For more information about reducing load speed and web design, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.