website loading tips guidesHaving a website with a slow loading speed can negatively affect the user experience while dramatically decreasing the rate of traffic you receive. That’s why it’s so important to invest in good quality web design, and we’ve got some great tips for you on how to create a solid website that won’t let you down when it matters the most.

Limit Use of Flash

Incorporating Flash for the sake of style can significantly slow down your website’s loading speed. Even worse, Flash has the potential to limit your website’s visibility to search engines due to the fact that it hasn’t been made available to them yet. So you should really think twice before you incorporate it into your website and ask yourself if it’s really necessary.

Compress the Images

Sure, including high-quality images in your web design is a great way to add a visual appeal to your message. However, you don’t have to add the images to your website as they are. Most websites compress their images to half their initial size in order to increase loading speed, and it’s also a good idea to describe the width and height of your images clearly in your HTML for the same reason.

Clean Up Your Code

Sometimes, it’s the things we don’t notice that take up the most space, like unnecessary tags or random white spaces that create extraneous HTML coding. That’s why it’s so important to always opt for HTML text instead of graphic text whenever possible, because the former is much faster than the latter, and will enable you to minimize the number of irrelevant tags on your website.

Take a page out of the Montway website for example, which manages to minimize white space by using it up as much as possible with relevant content. By the way, Montway is a car shipping business that services a wide range of clientele, from those relocating from one town to the other, to online car buyers and classic car lovers.

Use Thumbnails

Thumbnails are a great way to simplify the user experience on e-commerce websites because they allow you to show the client a sort of ‘preview’ of the product in the form of a smaller, fast-loading image. They can then use that image to decide whether or not they want more information or to add the item to their shopping cart.

Pay Attention to Page Size

When it comes to page size, less is more, and you want it to be in that sweet spot between 25 to 35kb. This means that everything will look professional and well put together, yet without compromising your website’s loading speed.

Switch to CSS

As many web developers have discovered, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is way more effective than the normal table layout. With CSS, you can create a website in half the time it takes when using a regular table layout. It also reduces the size of your website pages significantly, allowing for faster loading time and a more seamless user experience.

Reduce Server Requests

If you have too many features in your web design that require you to load images or pages from another server (i.e. ad, graphic, audio clip), then your users will be stuck with a slow-loading HTTP request every time they need to load a page. The best solution to this problem is to avoid the use of external content and mostly incorporate internal content to reduce loading time.