Today’s website visitor is not willing to sit and wait as your site slowly loads. Impatience will get the better of them. If your business’ website takes too long to load, your potential new customer will move on to your competition. It is critical to have a website that is not only well designed but also one that loads quickly to prevent this from happening, holding the visitor’s attention with the fast-appearing eye-catching design and well-written content.
Images Can Slow Down a Website, Turning Off Potential New Business
There are many factors that can affect the speed with which a website loads. One of the most common culprits for a slowed down site are large images taking a while to download. While images are certainly vital to enticing new customers, images that are too large can consume excessive bandwidth. This will ultimately slow down the entire site. Instead of scaling the image to fit the web page space, where it still retains the larger size when being loaded, a web designer can first scale the image in a design program to fit the space. Then when the smaller version is added to the web page, it not only fits perfectly but it also does not require the larger bandwidth to load images and scale them down. This is particularly important for a website which relies heavily on images to entice potential customers.
Browser caching allows you to store images on a visitor’s computer for easier retrieval. This means that those visitors to your site that have been to the page before already have a copy of the images. Retrieving these images from the computer’s cache is much less time consuming than downloading them each time. To take advantage of this, you will need to ensure that browser caching is enabled on your website.
Determining How the Web Pages Load Can Speed Up the Process for the User
Websites load Javascript files. While necessary in the design and proper running of the site, these Javascripts running can slow down the content that needs to be delivered, taking away precious time from your website speed. A web designer can set these Javascript files to load after the content. This means the visitor will see the content immediately and be completely unaware that this is continuing to load in the background.
Many web sites download content from different sources, all being brought together on one page. For example, the header and navigation may derive from one source while images and text on the page may come from elsewhere. If this content is being done one at a time, this can seriously impede the site’s loading. Instead the pages should be set up as asynchronous.
Making these changes to how your website is designed can make a big difference in the time that it takes to load your content. Particularly for prospects finding your site listed on Google, a fast-loading web page can keep them engaged and from moving on to the next website listed in the search results.
