The loading speed of your website can have a big influence on the overall website performance. Websites that take longer to load generally have a higher bounce rate. So how can you ensure that your website loads quickly? And what are the most common reasons for a slow website? Well, 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 common reasons for a slow website?
There are a number of factors that can contribute to a slow website. These include:
- Not optimising media and images
- JavaScript and CSS issues
- Ads
Image and media optimisation for a faster website
While images and video content can attract attention to your website and help enhance your company branding, making sure that this content is optimised for maximum performance can be an important factor. This includes:
- Compressing images- By using compression tools you can dramatically reduce the size of your images and media files, without reducing the quality. In fact, this media content will still be suitable for responsive design, scaling up and down as required by the screen or device size.
- 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.
JavaScript and CSS issues can slow your website down
JavaScript and CSS are both crucial components for website performance and functionality. But when these are added carelessly to your website they can cause the website to run more slowly. As a result, you should consider:
- Minifying your JavaScript and CSS files
- Combining a large number of JS/CSS files into fewer files
- Defer loading JavaScript until after all your content is loaded and use media queries for CSS files
Ads can decrease website speed
Ads are simply another form of media that can add weight to your website and impact negatively on the loading speed. If your website has multiple ad placements from external websites this can take longer to render, generate more requests, and impact on website stability.
For more information about reducing load speed and web design, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.