Quick Loading Websites
What Does It Mean To Have A Quick Loading Website?
A quick loading website is one that is optimized to load fast. That means that you will see all elements in the site nearly instantaneously. If your website loads in less than 4 seconds than you have a good loading website.
Why Is A Fast Loading Website Important?
- For the website visitor: You want to give visitors the best possible experience when visiting your website. If your website takes a long time to load it is likely to frustrate the user. Frustrated visitors are likely to not use your services/products. If your site takes too long to load it may even cause the user to leave your site. If a lot of visitors leave your site before it loads your bounce rate will be fairly high and look bad to search engines.
- For the search engines: Just like site visitors, if your site does not load quick enough the search engines are likely to leave before indexing your site. What does that mean for your website? If search engines don’t index your site then it is likely you will not show up in their search results.
How Can I Reduce My Website Load Time?
There are a few things that you can do to increase your website load time, all of which are fairly simple to perform.
- Reduce Code: By calling in external code (style sheets, JavaScript, PHP) you can cut down the load time by a lot. Using external code means that each external document only needs to load once, helping to speed up your load time. Not only does it speed up your website but it also helps clean up the code on each page, making it easier to change and update.
- Compress Graphics: Multimedia files like photos, audio, video and flash are known to be a cause of slow loading websites. If you can remove graphics that would be best, but if some graphics are required they should be compressed. Raw photos generally have a large file size and are just too big for the web. By compressing raw photos for the web using, Photoshop or other editing software, will help to optimize your website’s load time.
- Use CSS: Table-Cell websites, the older method of building websites, are known to load slower. Switching your website over to follow the W3C standards and using CSS as opposed to Table-Cell’s to build a website will not only make your website cross browser compatible but will also help to optimize your website.
- Choose Your Hosting Wisely: Many websites that load slow can be the cause of their hosting environment. Hosting your website on a server which uses fast processors is the key to having a quick loading website. Remember cheaper is usually not better, you get what you pay for. That doesn’t mean you have to choose the most expensive host but ask the provider about any problems they might have with slow loading websites.
- Avoid Premade Websites: While it might only make a small difference in your load time (depending on the program), premade and open source websites often have a lot of extra, unnecessary code in every page. All that extra code can take a toll on the load time of your website. To get the best load time it is recommended to take out all of the code that you don’t need to run your site, and run off the minimal amount of code necessary.
While your website load time won’t be the same on every computer (especially those with slow dial up internet) optimizing your site will help most visitors and search engines to get the best possible experience from your site. If your website loads slow and you don’t know how to fix it, contact our developers to optimize your website.
