One of the most critical things to keep in mind when you have a website is how quickly it loads. Sites that are slow to load are likely to force people to look elsewhere because they will expect a bad experience right from the off.
With the increases in connectivity and mobile browsing it is even more important that websites are able to load quickly on a variety of devices. The design of your website should be tailored to offer the slowest possible load times and allow easy navigation. Below are a few tips to help you get the best load times possible.
The first and most important thing to remember is to keep the home page as light as possible. The more things you have on it the slower it will load. Large pictures, videos and other visual content can dramatically reduce the speed of your site. Getting rid of all of the unnecessary things is a good idea. Formatting pictures so the files are as small as possible is an easy way to increase load speeds. You should only keep the content that you feel adds the most value to your site. Everything else can be put on other pages.
Compressing the whole website is a good way to ensure it loads quicker. By doing this you reduce the pressure on the serve to send data to pages while they load. There are several algorithms to use to accomplish this so you can find the right solution for you.
Long webpages usually take the longest time to load purely because of their size. If you have pages that require a great deal of scrolling to reach the bottom you should split them up to make them more manageable. This will help to speed up loading and also means you are less likely to lose the attention of your audience. People can be put off by large pages full of a great deal of text so it is better in both regards to have smaller, more focused ones.
Many websites load slowly because of poor coding or issues with the script. When you code a website you should try to use the same script as often as possible rather than several different ones. Search engines appreciate cleaner coding because it shows that care has been taken with the site and makes it easier to read. This has an extra benefit when it comes to SEO.
Modern web designers are placing more emphasis on leaving white spaces on sites. These help to create a unique look and differentiate the site but too many could be harming the load speed. Each space will add a small amount to the size of the website and therefore the load time. Leaving too many spaces can have a similar affect to having too much content.