As technology continues to become faster, more integrated and more advanced, we as humans become slower with shorter attention spans. If we can’t find the info we need in two or three clicks, we move on to something else. That’s the last thing you want your website visitors to do when they visit your site and that’s why I keep talking about user experience. Your site has to seamlessly integrate with the rest of the inter-webs and it has to be sleek, fast, and user-friendly if you want to capture the attention of your visitors.
We have discussed some ways in which you can improve the user-experience before, including using a 3-color palette and removing all the unnecessary elements. Today we’re going to talk about a few more things you can do to improve the user-experience for your visitors by making your site faster.
1. Clean Up Your Image(s)
Beautiful pictures can make a website look great, but they take up a lot of space. Be sure to compress your images before you add them to your website design by shrinking the image to half the original size.
By specifying the weight and height of your images in the HTML, you can help make the site load faster.
2. Less Code is More Speed
HTML text is faster than graphic text, but you can improve the speed of your site even more by cleaning up unnecessary HTML code, including tags, spaces, white space and anything else that can increase your file sizes. Less is more – so use defaults for your tags and remove whatever you can.
3. The CSS Switch
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are becoming increasingly popular amongst website designers, because it saves time in creating sites and it saves loading time by reducing page sizes.
4. Reduce Server Requests
Whenever a page element (image, video, audio, ad) is loaded from a different server, it sends an HTTP request. This happens every time the page is loaded, thus increasing loading time. You can avoid this by loading all your content onto your server, thus limiting external content.
5. Make Use of Thumbnails
You see them on e-commerce sites, and for good reason. It holds the attraction of a small image that loads fast. If they want to see more, they can click to see a larger image. You can make use of thumbnails for your blog’s archive pages, especially for the featured image.
So to recap, you can captivate visitors when they visit your site by making the website design as sleek, fast and user-friendly as possible. Remove all the clutter, compress your images, clean up your code and keep the crucial elements above the fold.
Also, remember to regularly clean up your site. Remove promotions or pages that are no longer required, or events that have already taken place.