People today do not have a minute to spare, and this extends to your website design as well. Your professional Web design should satisfy your customers’ demands, providing them with a range of options with which they can view the Web. A website that is slow, and takes time to load, can cost you a lot in this day and age. People do not have time or patience anymore to wait around for a site to load when there are numerous others available. If a web page is taking more than 4 seconds to load, people skip it and go to some other alternative. This can lose you sales, and most likely those people will not return because of the poor experience. Poor experiences mean that gradually Google will give your site a poor ranking. Instead of being on the top, or even on the first page of search results, your page will end up where no one will ever see it.
Almost every user only visits the first page of search engine results, and no one bothers to check out even the last website on that page because they do not have to. Nothing is more frustrating than slow download speed, and no matter how good your site is, users will not want to stick around and wait for it. Here are some professional Web design tips to help you out. Have a look!
1. Split Large Pages Into Shorter, Multiple Ones
One of the major reasons why websites have become slower these days is the increase in Web page size. If most of the pages on your website are too long, there is a chance it will take longer to load as well. There is only one solution that will eliminate this issue, and that is to split your long web pages into multiple shorter pages. With this technique, you will be eliminating the long scroll bar of your page, and people will be more inclined to have a look at your post because of its short length. Having many pages with lesser information is better than having one long page that no one is going to read.
2. Limit Your Use of Flash
Flash is more about style than the quality of your page. You can use it in professional Web design, but you have to use it carefully while creating your website. You cannot assume that all your users will have the right flash player, and even if they do, it will still increase the download time of your site. Flash is also not accessible to search engines yet and will only hinder your search engine optimization efforts.
3. Image Size
Large images will put more load on your site; you need to stop that from happening. Images can look all pretty from the outside, but in reality, they are slowing you down. You may not realize the space they occupy on your page when you create your web design, but your users will soon experience it. You should compress your images before adding them to your web design. You can usually reduce image size by half. Specifying the height of your images in your HTML can also decrease loading time.
4. Thumbnails
Thumbnails can save your websites from falling into the pit of the low ranked. They can prove to be a helpful website design technique for people who run e-commerce websites. With thumbnails, your customers will be provided with small images of your product. They can then decide to enlarge the image if they want to.
5. Eliminate Server Requests
When an audio clip or an ad of yours loads from a different server, an HTTP request will be generated every time your page loads. A website will work better if it has limited external content and load considerably faster.
6. Consider Switching to CSS
People are now switching over to Cascading Style Sheets, also known as CSS, instead of using a traditional table layout. CSS is the styling language that serves you purposes. It reduces page size and download time and as a result will save you and your visitors time.
7. Code
How can you make HTML text much faster than it already is – by cleaning up your HTML coding, including additional spaces and tags! This will result in an immediate and significant decrease in the size of your files.
Creating a website design for your business is a major step toward building your business. You should always make sure that your site is fast and does not get ignored by your visitors.