Top 5 Web Design Tips to Help Your Website Load Faster

Page loading times are important for your website, whether it is your desktop or mobile version. Faster loading times are:

• better for SEO because loading times are one of the factors Google uses to determine rankings;
• better for customer satisfaction because if pages take a long time to load, the experience will not be as good;
• better for conversions because faster page loading times will encourage visitors to stay on your site for longer.

So how can you make your pages load faster?

1. Create a lighter website

One of the first things to do is ensure your website is light. This is one of the things we always do at CSI Media, and by making sure the pages are smaller, the site will load faster.

If you have lots of videos and images that are not actually necessary, get rid of them and only keep those elements that are adding value. The more elements on the page, the longer it will take to load, so keep the design simple.

2. Reduce plugins on the page

Plugins can have a serious impact on your page loading times, so try to use only as many as you really need and delete those that you don't need.

If you are having problems, go through the plugins and disable them one by one to work out which one is causing the issue.

3. Make sure the images are optimised

Images should be optimised on your website to ensure the pages load faster. Most websites use images, but they can make the site slow to load if they are too large.

Keep your images small, crop them and reduce the colour depth to a lower level to make the pages faster.

4. Split up large pages

Large pages take longer to load, so split them up and see if this reduces loading times. This is an easy way to make a difference, and you can do it yourself or hire specialist website designers such as ourselves to do it for you.

You don't have to do it with all your pages, but if you have lots of large pages and your site is slow, this could be a good solution to try. It may even help to improve the navigation for users.

5. Compress the site

Make sure you enable compression on your website. Large pages can be slow to load, so you may want to zip them up using a tool like Gzip. Compression is a way to reduce the bandwidth of the pages, and it can cut download times significantly, so it is always worth considering.

Other things you can do

There are various other things that you can do when designing your website to keep the page load times fast. For example:

• use clean coding, which is also good for SEO;
• don't use CSS expressions;
• make use of caching;
• don't use redirects;
• cut down on DNS Lookups.

These are all ways to reduce page loading times, and these are things that we always take into account when designing websites. So let us know if you would like a snappy website and we will be happy to help.