Decreasing Load Time Of Website To Retain Customers

By Author: Krish Garison
Total Articles: 22
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Patience is virtuous. Practicing this when viewing a website is difficult. The users prefer speedy websites. If the website loads slowly, the viewer can lose their patience. Chances are that they will never revisit the website. Improving the loading speed of a website is important. It is also beneficial for improving the search engine rankings. One of the major search engines, Google changed their algorithms and included the website speed as a determinant. While this may not be directly affecting the search results, including the website speed is important when strategizing about SEO.

For an effective business website design, it is important to plan its design and development issues so that page load time decreases. The following are some of the steps that can help in decreasing the loading time:

The first step is checking the current speed of the website. This can be done by analyzing the page speed. This would help in tracking the improvement of the page and ascertain that the changes done befit the website. There is no dearth of free tools that would help in checking the load time. The second step in decreasing ...
... the page load time can be attained by optimizing the images. As professional website Design Company, they should know which file would be apt for the website. Altering to different file types also help in decreasing the file size. For example, the GIF format is ideal for the images with few colors like the logos. The PNG is appropriate for the superior quality transparent images. On the other hand, the JPEG is great for the images with detailing and colors. Thirdly, it is important to change the format of the images without scaling them down. The large images should not be preferred so that its height and width elements can be written in HTML. If there is a need of a 100x100px image, and if the image size is more, open source software like the Photoshop or other web based image editors can be used to reshape the image. The file size is decreased and this improved the overall page loading times.

The next step is to compress and optimize the content. HTTP compression can be used. This can be built within the web servers and web clients. This would enable a better use of the available bandwidth. This also increases the transmission speed between the two. The other method is to compress the JavaScript and CSS files. Other than this, transferring the stylesheet references to the head of the HTML documents would help. This is because it would allow the web page to render the style gradually. All script references can be included in the bottom. If the script is written at the top of the web page, it has the potential to block everything below it. The script reference should be present as far below in the HTML document as possible. Other thing to be remembered is to place the JavaScript and CSS file in external files. If placed in the HTML documents, both are downloaded every time the page is requested. The subsequent step is to cache the web pages, and the database queries. This would automatically decrease the stress on the server. Drupal Core has native caching while in WordPress, the developer can check out the WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. Since, we are ensuring that the website design is devised to reduce its loading time; we should also reduce the 301 Redirects. The Redirects forces the browser to new URL that increase the loading time.

Any website design company would suggest the importance of speed. It is an indispensable metric that would optimize the user experience.

Author Bio:
Any business website design project needs to be carefully planned. One of the metrics that affects the audience, decreasing the loading time ensures customer retention. Steven Brown thinks that to achieve success in this field, website optimization is an essential part.