5 tips to improve your loading speed
Published: June 2020
5 easy web design tricks to improve your loading speed
When it comes to web design, your page loading speed should be at the top of your agenda. The time it takes to load your website, on any device, is a vital sign of how well it will perform.
Fortunately, there are some very simple tricks you can do today to improve your website loading speed and, as a result, decrease your bounce rate, boost conversions and keep customers browsing for longer.
How do you measure website loading speed?
There are many tools that promise accurate measurement of website loading speed. We recommend sticking to Google’s very own Pagespeed Insights, which not only measures your site speed but also helps to identify areas for improvement.
You might also want to check out GTMetrix, a highly trusted and robust site speed tool that test your website across multiple domains.
Why is website speed so important?
Website visitors simply don’t have the patience to sit around and wait for your website to load.
In fact, 40% of users are likely to abandon a site if it doesn’t load within three seconds. If you sell products online, this could be the difference between a customer choosing you or your competitor.
It’s not just about customer experience, either. Google has confirmed that site speed is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. If your website is slow to load, it will certainly affect your Google ranking and render your hard-earned SEO pointless.
All in all, a combination of poor customer experience and potentially damaging Google rankings makes site speed a vital part of your web design strategy. Here’s how to kick that loading wheel into touch…
Compress images
One of the easiest web design hacks to improve site speed is to reduce your image sizes.
Ideally, you should be resizing images before uploading to your site. You can easily do this on Photoshop or using an online tool like Resize Image. We recommend keeping your images to a maximum 100KB, ideally even smaller than this to optimise your page speed loading time.
If you already have loads of images on your WordPress website, don’t worry – we’re not going to make you delete them all and start again! Instead, you can add a plugin to your website which compresses, optimises and lazy loads images. Obviously, we recommend putting the time into compressing your images before you upload, however we can help you get the right plug in for your website to help your site speed.
Get in touch with the Urban River web design team on how we can help speed up your website. Call us on 0191 456 6199 or email info@urbanriver.com
Host video elsewhere
Everybody is talking about video right now. And while we agree that video is a fantastic way to grow your brand, you have to be wary of embedding large files into your website, and how that could affect your loading speed.
If you want to share a video on your site, upload to YouTube or Vimeo first and then embed the video to your page of choice – this way, the video is hosted elsewhere and will not make a negative impact on your page speed.
Deactivate unused plugins
Did you know that if you have a lot of active plugins, your website may be loading slowly? You should put time aside every month to review your plugins – do any need updating? Are any not in-use?
If you find plugins that you do not currently use, but you may wish to in the future, you can deactivate them and this will not affect your page speed. However, if you don’t ever intend to use this plugin again, we highly recommend deleting it entirely as this will minimise any security risk.
Minify CSS, Javascript and HTML
Minifying code is one of the most effective ways of improving site speed. By minifying your CSS, Javascript and HTML, you will dramatically decrease load times and bandwidth usage. It will also enhance your website’s accessibility and user experience.
If you have a web design agency, they should be actively keeping an eye on your code and ensuring that it is not causing any problems like slow-loading pages.
Upgrade your hosting
So, you’ve compressed your images, minified your code and even cleaned out your unused plugins, but your website is still slow to load. What’s next? Your hosting package may be the cause of your site speed headaches.
Often, companies will choose the cheapest hosting provider without examining what they are getting for their money.
When you choose to work with a web design agency like Urban River, you can transfer to one of our preferred hosting providers. We’ll take care of the website management, including actively improving your website’s loading speed and proactively monitoring for any security risks.
