Load speed optimization is an important part of website design and development. Unfortunately it often falls through the cracks as few clients remember to ask for it and even fewer website developers actually take the time to do it! Website design and development & load speed optimization need to go hand in hand. Several of our clients come to us having never heard of load speed optimization. So we wanted to shed some light on the subject matter to make sure everyone out there knows how important this factor really is for a new website. Load speed optimization simply means that your web design company has taken the extra steps to ensure your web pages don’t take forever to load. It’s really quite simple – a slow loading speed is the kiss of death for any new website. This is especially true for eCommerce websites. Customers will not wait – even a few extra seconds will turn them away leave your website. Nobody likes to wait 5 or even 10 seconds for an image or product detail page to load. Your customers are busy professionals and they’ll sooner browse away from your website completely and take their business elsewhere before waiting those extra seconds. It’s a fast paced and finicky world out there but when it comes to slow load speeds you really can’t blame customers for moving on. Slow websites are frustrating and give visitors a poor impression of your website and overall business.
There are various things that can be done in order to optimize your website load speed starting by selecting the correct server and hosting company for your site. Simplifying and optimizing your website’s code is equally important. It’s not every developer or web design company that has the expertise to code in a clean, organized and optimal manner either. For example, you can reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred from the server to the browser by using a number of techniques. Below are just a few of the things that should be completed by development to get your new website humming along at record speeds! The adjustments are associated with the server, website images, JS, CSS, and your website content.
- Compress and scale all images
- Enable gzip compression
- Optimize website images
- Leverage browser caching
- Combine images into CSS Sprites
- Defer the parsing of JavaScript
- Minify HTML, CSS & JavaScript
Sound a bit complicated and confusing? Not to worry, at Isadora Design we handle all of this for you so your website is optimized and turbo charged within the 1st day of going live. Have you checked your website load speed lately? Does your homepage take longer than 2 seconds to load? Do you notice a high rate of customer drop off occurring during the cart checkout process? Get these things looked at by a professional web design company and you’ll see your website load speed improve dramatically.