Best Practices for Faster Page Load Times
People love getting what they want quickly nowadays, and things are no different when they are perusing your site. As such, it is in your best interest to ensure it’s as fast as possible. To help you achieve this, we’ve prepared a guide on web design best practices for faster page load times!
Do Not Place Too Many Images, Videos, and Other Similar Elements on Your Pages
One of the web design best practices for faster page load times: don’t put too much stuff on pages! Even if you are trying to make a great product page, you’ll never need more than five pictures. And if you want to include a video, you can remove pictures or add one or two. Using too many pictures is likely to have a negative effect, anyway. People get overwhelmed by all the visual input and fail to properly take in the information your page is trying to share. That can easily make them leave your site. And if they had to wait a couple of minutes for the page to load correctly in the first place, they’ll do it! After all, no matter how well you optimize your page elements, they can't quickly load if there are too many.
Know how to Optimize Your Image and Video Size, Quality, and Format
When looking into web design best practices for faster page load times related to images and video files, remember this: never use unusual file formats, always use compression, and keep them to a reasonable size on your screen. File formats, such as JPG, GIF, PGN, MOV, and MP4, are popular. They are stable, you can do effective compression on them to reduce their size without affecting their quality, and they can be loaded quickly and handled by most systems. Trying to experiment with file types can result in good things. But, more likely, it will make them fail to load properly on some platforms or slow downloading.
Make Sure Your Site is Well-Optimized for All Platforms
Speaking of loading on different platforms, it is incredibly crucial that your site design properly accounts for any devices it might be opened on. Nowadays, if your site works only on a PC and fails to load correctly on a smartphone, or vice versa, you are in serious trouble. That immediately cuts down the audience you can reach. And, as the web design experts from Movers Development point out, it also seriously hurts your SEO score. More often than not, poorly optimized site design loads extremely oddly on platforms it’s not made for. And it takes forever for the pages to load, too.
Try to Avoid Overusing Plugins of All Kinds
Plugins are great and some of the best additions you can make to your website. As long as you don’t overdo it, that is. Nowadays, plugins that link social media or media files to your website are practically a requirement. The latter, especially, can be super helpful since they lift some burdens from your site directly and speed up loading. However, the opposite happens if you have too many plugins on your site. Your site will start struggling to run them all and, as such, seriously slow down. Too many plugins also mean you must manage them all, and neglecting their maintenance and updates can seriously compromise your site’s cybersecurity.
Look Into Content Delivery Networks
Your site has static design elements which do not necessarily need to be hosted by your original site host services. Therefore, to take advantage of this and speed up loading times, content delivery networks were made. Essentially, they are servers that host some of your site’s content and assist in loading. Note that this means you can’t replace your host with them! The two are meant to work alongside each other. So, you should pay attention to your host from the get-go and select a fast, reliable hosting provider for your site.
Work out Your Site’s Caching
Some website design elements will be constant, no matter what page you open. As such, it is possible to accelerate the loading process by properly implementing caching for these elements. Essentially, caching means the browser ‘saves’ these elements, eliminating the need to load them repeatedly each time a new page opens. That can help you craft the best website even if you pick some harder-to-load elements, so long as you know what you are doing and are savvy about setting up your caching.
Try to Reduce the Size of Your Cookies as Well
Cookies are a way to store some of the data that gets reused between ‘requests,’ or, in other words, the different times you open up the website in question. Typically, this means that cookies speed up how you can interact with the site in question. However, if the cookies grow too big and bloated, this negatively affects your loading times. As such, another of the web design best practices for faster load times is to use cookies but carefully regulate their size and keep them relatively ‘small.’
Optimizing the Way Your Pages Load
The final of the web design best practices for faster page load times is to set up how your pages load properly. And there are two ways you can set uploading of your site’s elements: synchronous loading and asynchronous loading. Synchronous loading sequences the way your pages load and loads in the elements ‘higher up’ on the page first. Asynchronous loading, however, always loads everything at once. At the same time, it may sound like the former benefits you, but it caps the loading speed of your site. For people with slower internet, this is not too big an issue. However, for people using fast internet, this annoying problem makes them wait longer. Since page speed loading times are as crucial as keyword optimization, letting anything slow them down is detrimental to you. The need to avoid synchronous loading is, therefore, logical.
Ensuring Your Site Always Loads as Quickly as Possible
By using web design best practices for faster page load times, as we outlined, you can speed up your site! And, in turn, you’ll make your site more popular. The only thing to remember is to use them consistently, and you will quickly achieve success.
Nuno
I'm a filmmaker with extensive training in multiple sectors of content creation whose films have been shown all over the world. I have also served as a speaker and jury member in multiple events. Nonetheless, in recent years, I became extremely disappointed with the course of the art world in general, and as consequence, I've developed an interest in topics I believed would become crucial for the future, namely, cybersecurity, self-education, web design, and investing in various assets, such as cryptocurrencies. All those events have driven me to launch RushRadar.