How To Improve Website Speed
In a digital world where the majority of awareness for your brand will be garnered online, making sure your site speed is optimized has become one of the most important factors of engagement. We’ve all seen websites that are poorly managed, taking so long to load that it causes us to exit out without thinking twice. In other cases, some websites may perform well on all pages except one, causing a rift in the consistency of the user experience. In any case, if you plan on selling products via the website, or if your intention is to create a social environment where users can interact daily, site speed matters immensely. Fortunately, there are many ways to improve the speed of your website and they’re easy to implement into the framework of your website design.
Image Optimization
One of the fastest, most effective ways to lower your page loading speed would be to properly optimize the images used on your site. Each time a person visits your site, they’ll have to load each image for it to appear in their browser. The larger each file size is, the longer it will take for each visitor to load a given page, and more pages with unoptimized images will begin to heighten your overall site speed. Through photoshop and other compression tools, you can easily reduce image file sizes while still maintaining visual quality. It is also recommended to use the .png file type for images containing less than 16 colors and to use .jpg type for photography. Smashed Media can aid companies with web design in Fort Lauderdale to properly organize and optimize their image cache to increase speed.
Limiting External Scripts & Plugins
When it comes to utilizing trendy widgets, scripts, or other third-party integrations, you want to be careful to only use those that are worthy of slowing down your site. While it’s a great idea to establish a presence on each social media website available today, that doesn’t mean it’s a great idea to integrate each of those sites onto your website design. Each time your website has to make an HTTP request to update its information, the longer your users will have to wait, and it’s been proven that over 40% of visitors will leave a site that takes three or more seconds to load.
The same is true for comment forms which may allow users to add .gif images to their posts. If your business model is reliant upon interaction, allowing certain plugins in your website design that helps the user experience may be worth it. However, in the case of plugin usage, it can be easy to add a multitude of plugins that perform tasks which can be accomplished manually. Not only will too many plugins slow down your site speed, but they often require weekly updates that alter their compatibility with more essential site components. As part of proper web design in Fort Lauderdale and surrounding areas, Smashed Media provides ongoing maintenance to ensure each new version update of WordPress can handle the current plugin pool.
Monitoring Performance
There is a myriad of methods for reducing webpage load speeds, but the most important thing to remember is that these techniques need testing. By hiring a web design company like Smashed Media in Fort Lauderdale, we can implement numerous tests including the Google developer page speed insights to find out exactly what’s holding your site speed back. Through testing out each plugin and script one by one, we can work with your brand to determine which additions are worth keeping or removing. With the techniques mentioned above, plus many more, improving website speed becomes an easy project that won’t drastically change the appearance of your website.
