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The need for speed: 4 things you need for your website to be quick to load and access

Even if you are a mellow, patient sort, you know loading speed and quick access are key components of good website user experience.

Why is this important?

  1. Website loading speed is a factor in search engine rankings. The faster your website loads, the higher it is going to be ranked.
  2. Moreover, loading speed is the second thing a user experiences (your website address being the first one) in a series of actions before someone reaches a desired destination on your website.

So make a good impression, don’t keep them waiting too long and put that information swiftly right to their fingertips by following these 4 tips!

1. Use a certified hosting provider with a data centre that is close to your audience

Hosting is the soil where you are going to plant your website.
A certified hosting provider will have solutions for reduced server response times, data compression, traffic management, caching, proper safety and security, and more. Make sure you discuss optimisation issues when you are buying hosting with your hosting provider and your web design company.
We have our own favourites, as described on this blog: We love our hosting company so much we blogged about them.
If you are local business, you might want to get your hosting from a company which has data centres in your country or even in your city, when most of your clients are nearby. Ask your hosting provider about the location of their data centres and pick the one that is closer to you.
If your business is spread around the world, you might want to look into content delivery networks. It is a system of distributed servers that deliver webpages to a user based on the geographic locations. Another solution for international clients would be cloud hosting. These types of servers are also distributed around the world and work blazing fast.

2. Reduce your website size

It is a good idea to remove outdated content from your website. Actually, you might want to remove everything that is not attracting and informing visitors. Therefore, analyze your traffic, improve content, and put the most desired information to the front.
Optimise images by using PNG image optimisation tools. For JPEGs, never go above 80% for image quality. Choose 50-70% image quality for larger JPEGs and 70%-80% image quality for smaller JPEGs. If you are a WordPress user, you can use a plugin for this.
Other files, such as CSS, JavaScript, and even HTML should be properly compressed as well. Discuss code compression issues with your website design agency. Ask your design agency to keep clean coding practices and request for thorough testing that would eliminate slow plugins, conflicts in code, messy database, font issues, etc.

Build responsive web design

Responsive web design optimises your website for all devices, so you can load your website quickly based on the type of device. For instance, if you are browsing on mobile, less information might be needed. Most likely you will hide parts of your website on mobile devices.
Responsive web design introduces incentives for increased website scaling and better optimisation solutions. If you go responsive, your web design agency most likely will put more research into your website. In the end, your website will get better by using scalable icons, more CSS and less images, reusable content and more.

Help your audiences find what they are looking for quickly

Last but not least, check your site and ask yourself how long does it take for your site visitor to get to information that they need.
What you don’t want is visitors wandering around your website trying to understand what it is all about! Therefore, time spent until someone finds what they are looking for is also a speed factor, if you will. It is essential to introduce clear branding and up to the point messages to your audiences. Make sure you properly explore your brand, target audiences and communication goals. Your home page is commonly the most visited page of your website.
Quick tips:

  1. Your home page has to be easy to understand and should have shortcuts to main locations of your website.
  2. Don’t forget about navigation. Your main navigation should sum up the entire sitemap of your website.
  3. Check your website for broken links – there should be none.

Follow these tips in order to make your website work like lightning. And of course, we are always here to offer help – would you like some? You know where to find us (email team@topleftdesign.com and use the reference “Speedy Website” in your subject so we know what brought you to us!

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