5 Ways Design Can Influence Your Site Speed

Site speed is one of the most important elements when optimizing for SEO.

11:55 07 August 2019

This can make or break your overall conversion rate as well as the number of visitors that are staying on your site. Getting this right can be challenging particularly if you are doing this alone without the help of an Essex web design agency. In this article, we will be looking into 5 ways that your design efforts can be influencing your site speed.

Un-Optimised Images Can Slow You Down

When placing images on your site, it helps to break up the content, but adding images that have not been optimised can lead to an increased loading time particularly if there are multiple of them. In order to combat this, every image should be optimised by using tools such as Tiny PNG which helps to optimise the image and improve loading time as a result. Though this may not be the definitive reason for the increased loading time, this will help to bring it down over time.

CSS And JavaScript Can Take Longer To Process

When building the website, adding CSS and JavaScript to the initial HTML coding can create a dynamic website that is fit for purpose. However, this CSS and JavaScript coding can take longer to process if not optimised fully. By using this style of coding and optimising it from the back end, you can increase the server time and help to ensure your website loads significantly faster than it would do if it remained not optimised.

Site Navigation Issues

If your site has a large sitemap that is difficult to navigate, the loading time will be significantly higher. Therefore, removing pages that are no longer needed from the site map will help to improve this loading time and help with navigational issues. A recent study has indicated that 53% of mobile users will click off of a website if it takes over 3 seconds to load, this is a huge amount of traffic that could be lost as a result and therefore needs to be optimised effectively. In addition to this, a number of redirects and other coding elements can lead to an increase in loading time as the user is being redirected to a number of different pages, thus hurting SEO optimisation.

Content Can Slow Down Site Speed

If your website is full of text, images, video and other design elements this can take longer for the server to load. If you have a slow server coping with an HTTP request, you can then begin to notice a slow server response. By optimising the content to its own page with relevant coding you can then begin to optimise the content that is present and help to improve the loading times as a result.

Reduce Redirects

Every time there is a redirect when you gain an HTTP request this can begin to slow down the loading time of your website and lead to significantly more issues as a result. In order to improve SEO efforts and help to keep your website healthy, it is important to reduce the number of redirects that are present as well as improve both inbound and any outbound links that may be slowing your website down.

 

Whether you are looking to make a vast number of changes in the near future or you are looking to strategize a new plan for a brand new website, this can all help to increase the site speed and keep your website functioning as it should be.