Web Design Tips: How to Make Your Website Load Faster

Web Design Tips

Your site’s overall performance has become more important than ever over the past couple of years. In fact, giving users a fast online experience is one of the most effective ways to retain users, which, in turn, leads to more visitors and sales in the long run.

Meanwhile, poor website performance results in higher bounce rates and, eventually, loss of sales.

In this post, we’re going to cover a few effective tips as suggested by Blue Whale Media on how to make your site load faster, as well as the crucial steps that you need to take to optimize your website’s page speed.

Compress Images

The thing about those gorgeous stock free photos that you keep on adding on your site is that they’re huge.

So, if you downloaded these photos and uploaded them on your website as they are, then you’re making a big mistake.

One of the simplest ways to improve the speed of your site is to compress your images. There are several ways in which you can compress and optimize these images:

  • Don’t pick images that have a large dimension: Make sure that you pick the right image size before you embed it on your post or page.
  • Utilize the right type of image: Choosing the right file type is crucial. The photographs and detailed images that you pick should be JPGs. However, for images with white backgrounds, you can use PNG.
  • Optimize your images: The file size of your image should be significantly reduced by saving it at a lower quality and compressing it. Also, before you upload images on your site, you should run them through on tinypng.com first. That way, you can significantly decrease your image’s file size, no matter how big or small.

Eliminate Too Many Internal Redirects

Another thing that could hurt your site in terms of page speed has too many redirects.

These usually happen when you’re sending users to a different place than what’s originally requested. Although redirects do have its uses, having a lot of them will eventually affect your page loading speed.

So, if you think that this might be the cause of why your website takes a while to load, then you have to take off any unnecessary redirects. Alternatively, if you’re not utilizing a responsive design, then Google suggests switching to get rid of redirects.

Reuse Design Elements

Another way to decrease the loading times on your site is to reuse various elements.

Keep in mind that each unique page design needs more code for you to build. When it comes to designing brand new pages, think about the other elements that you’ve already created, and know whether or not they can be reused instead of creating something completely new.

For instance, when building a landing page for a campaign, is there a way to repurpose other elements on your site? Maybe a mix of new and old elements could work?

You can also communicate this idea if you’re going to outsource web design in the Philippines, for example.

Don’t design anything without thinking about how it goes with the rest of the elements on your site. Establish design patterns. That way, you’re creating a more consistent user experience and also ensuring that web designers and developers can optimize their code for better performance.

Simplify Your Web Design

A site that’s designed with all the bells and whistles will always look spectacular. However, you might be using a massive amount of code, making your site load slower and heavier.

As much as you can, simplify your design. Make it lighter so that it can load fast, whether on desktop, tablet, or mobile.

Reduce the Number of Custom Fonts

To improve your site’s performance, decrease the number of custom fonts that you might be using in your web design.

This also applies to the weight of the font that you’re using. The lesser the custom fonts that you utilize, the fewer the files that needed to be accessed. As a result, your site will load faster.

So, keep this in mind at the beginning of site design, and think it over before you decide to use another font.

Activate Google AMP

By implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on your website, you can boost its loading speed regardless of the device or distribution platform.

That’s because AMP utilizes an ultra-minimalistic HTML that helps speed up the loading time of your content.

Minimize HTTP Requests

Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP requests whenever a browser fetches a page, file, or photo from a web server. But according to Yahoo, these requests can take up 80% of the total load time of your web page.

Meaning, the more HTTP requests that you have to load, the longer it will take for your page to retrieve everything, which increases the load time of your website.

Use Caching and CDN

Your CDN or Content Delivery Network will copy your website on servers, which can reduce the data travel time by connecting users to a server that’s geographically closer to your site visitor.

The static content will also be cached, and then delivered by the CDN’s servers.

To boost the speed of your site for repeat visitors, ensure that you leverage your browser caching. Browser caching works when you download the files from the server and on to the user’s device.

Design Your Website for Mobile

According to research done by Google on mobile page speed, 53% of mobile users leave a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. That could be a big problem for you in the long run.

It takes approximately 10 seconds for 75 percent of mobile sites to load. But with more than half of the total web traffic coming from mobile devices, these numbers are unlikely to go down.

So, if you keep your mobile web users happy, then they’re more likely to stick around!

If you’re utilizing CMS like Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress, there are plugins available in these platforms that can help make your site more mobile-friendly.

Consider Your Hosting Server

Your hosting server plays a crucial role in your site’s overall performance. No matter how much you optimize your site, if you have a server that’s slow and responsive, then all those efforts are for nothing.

To be able to gauge your server’s performance, you need to check the TTFB or the Time to First Byte. This is the time it usually takes to start loading the assets on your site.

If you see a TTFB that’s over a second, then you might want to speak with your web host provider or go with another web provider altogether. An excellent server could get a TTFB in just under 200 milliseconds.

So there you have it. Those are the tips that could make your site load faster. Keep in mind that these practices are constantly changing, so you need to check your site regularly as you go on making improvements.

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