As a successful web development company in Australia, most of our clients ask us to design a fast loading website, because speed has become one of the most important features in small business web design. After all, no-one wants to wait 10 seconds for a web page to open and the longer your web pages take to load on a visitor’s browser, the more likely they are to click away and find a faster site.
This is why all of our websites are designed with speed very much front of mind.
What’s the benchmark?
In general, web pages need to be visible in less than 3 seconds, because research has shown that any slower than this and you lose customers. This is perhaps even more important for mobile users than for desktop users. If you have lots of visitors who come and go quickly, this can also decrease your ranking in Google.
If your website is running too slow, it’s best that you contact your local web development company in Brisbane who can diagnose the problem and speed up the loading times. There are actually a lot of steps involved in speeding up a website’s loading times however, so if you are interested, here are a few of the strategies that we use to speed up our client’s websites.
Web development strategies for site speed
Professional small business web design demands fast loading web pages. One of the quick ways to identify what is causing your web pages to load too slowly is to right click on a web page, select ‘inspect element’ and then ‘network’. This reloads the page and generates a graph of the loading times for each page element, and you can use this data to start your diagnosis.
You can also use Google Page Speed which will give you tips on increasing your site’s loading times, and Google Analytics that identifies pages that load too slowly on your website. Once you know which pages are the cause of your problems, you can work through the following tips to try and fix the problem.
- Compress, combine and minify CSS and JS files.
- Compress and properly format all images.
- Leverage browser caching.
- Reduce HTML, CSS and JavaScript file sizes.
- Minimise and make as few HTTP requests as possible.
- Use a CDN (content delivery network).
All of the above is pretty technical, so even though there are plugins/software out there which can handle some of it for you, you do have to know what you’re doing, otherwise you could break your website without even realising.
Small business web design in Brisbane doesn’t have to be complicated, you just need to find a web development team that can give you a quality site with fast loading pages.
