The internet is fickle and impatient. 57{3eb5e81dc2dbd5243766a445dfd7203b99614852f30724c0fcd7c1e47478fab9} of users will abandon a website if it doesn’t load in three seconds or less, and e-shoppers want it to load even faster.
That means that you will potentially lose over half your audience if your site takes longer than three seconds to load.
Therefore, designing your site to be super fast is a definite step towards increasing your customer retention. So how can you design your site for optimum speed?
Imagine your server as lazy. It must physically work for every element that you include. So you want to give the server as little work to do as possible to help it to quickly assemble all the things it needs to put your site in front of viewers. Here are our top 3 tips for quickly revving the server engine and roaring to success.
Minimalism
The most straightforward way of speeding up your loading time, keeping your site simple allows for a rapid load speed; go Swedish. Whilst this doesn’t mean you need a literal bare bones site, it does mean considering where you can streamline to allow for a little less web wind resistance!
Like any good minimalist design, white is key. The more white or negative space you use, the less work the server has to do to fill in the pixels. Likewise, using smaller images and only one font means the server doesn’t have to think too hard about what it is doing! You are minimising the HTTP requests that need to be made; a HTTP request is required for each element and takes time. Leaner = faster.
Let it be lazy
Lazy loading basically means that only what is directly on your screen is loaded; anything ‘below the line’ is not loaded until you begin scrolling. This is particularly good for one page sites, or any site which require a lot of scrolling through content.
You can find web plugins for your site which will provide you with lazy loading.
WordPress has one here, https://wordpress.org/plugins/lazy-load/, but plenty of others are available.
Get some help
Google wants to make the internet faster. Your website is part of that. Your speed is important to Google (well, sort of). Therefore, they have set up a series of tools to help you get the fastest site speed possible; ‘Make the Web Faster’. Page Speed Insights will help you to break down and analyse exactly what is slowing down your site, and where you can optimise for maximum speed.
There are, of course, multiple other more complex ways to speed up your site! Try this guide to get you started, and then feel free to give us a shout if you need some more help.
