For any website, the amount of traffic serves as its lifeblood, and that traffic is partly dependent upon your website’s loading time. The following outlines 10 reasons why it’s crucial to create web pages that load fast.
1 – Use HTML
The most important tip to create a fast-loading website is to use HTML as much as possible. You can create anything you want by using HTML, and it makes your website significantly faster as well.
2 – Avoid Animated GIFs
Animated GIFs look extremely cool, and engage your website’s visitors with its attractiveness. However, the downside is that the animated GIFs are extremely slow to load. Therefore, avoid them as much as you can.
3 – Optimize Your Images
Images hold vital importance in a webpage. They convey your message, hook your reader’s attention, and are pleasant to look at. However, they significantly slow down your website as well. Images placed within page content are sometimes as important as the content itself, so the best thing to do is to optimize them. Crop the images to the most important part only, limit its height and width, convert the format to a more suitable one or lower the quality to an acceptable extent. In short, optimize the images so they consume less.
4 – Disable the Pop-Ups
Pop-ups are some of the biggest culprits in slowing down a website. A whole procession of Java script is required for them to get loaded. Therefore, make sure to disable any kind of pop-ups that your website has.
5 – Create Multiple Pages for Large Content
For a reader, it is always preferable to navigate between multiple pages than to wait for a huge page to be loaded. Therefore, it is advisable to create multiple pages for large content and link them with each other. It will not only decrease the loading time of the webpage, but it will improve the visitor’s reading experience.
6 – Use the Same Template
Using the same template for the entire website can significantly decrease the website’s loading time. Once a template has been loaded, moving from page to page does not consume excess resources, and hence, the pages are loaded faster than ever.
7 – Utilize Efficient Coding
Efficient coding is one of the most important factors in a website’s loading time. Make sure to avoid complicated scripts, and apply efficient coding with no broken links or unwanted tags. Keep your website error-free and it will take less time to load.
8 – Use Text Links
Text links should always be used over graphic buttons. Text links take significantly less time when compared with buttons, and can be customized with intelligent placement, designs and font selection.
9 – Use Tables Intelligently
Tables are excellent alternatives to images and graphics. Make sure to use tables wisely and sparingly. Do not load your tables with unnecessary and futile information.
10 – Run Website Speed Tests
Your task is still not done after acting upon the above-mentioned tips and tricks. In order to make sure that your website loads fast, you need to perform website speed tests regularly. Make sure to check your website’s loading speed, every time you make any changes to it.
About the author: This article was provided by the team at Web Design Australia and Website Hotline.
Credits: Image courtesy of Jay Lopez.