We’ve all had this problem. You arrive at a creative, beautifully designed website, only to be frustrated by slow page loads and end up clicking away in annoyance. Of course, as an experienced web design company, we understand how to keep your site moving quickly and your users happy, so read on for our tips.
First of all, your site likely contains images of some kind, so one of the ways to keep everything running smoothly is to compress your .jpg or .gif images (when using Photoshop, use the Save for the Web feature) and specify image dimensions - if you leave the height or width attributes blank, the browser will not know how much space to leave for each image and therefore their load time will be increased. Furthermore, do not use HTML to resize images with IMG tag, because the user still needs to download the full size one - use thumbnails instead.
Next, use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead of Tables or another website design and coding solution; not only it is more efficient for your users, it is better for search engine optimization purposes as well. You can even use CSS Shorthand to further increase your site’s efficiency and load speed. Also, consider using AJAX (asynchronous Javascript and XML) instead of page refreshes - this technology can make page refreshes almost entirely unnecessary because it allows their browers to retrieve data from the server without interfering with the behavior or display of the current page.
Last but not least, the server your website is hosted on also affects your page load speed - keep your servers up to date and upgrade your memory if you need to accelerate your processing times. Our web design agency owns dedicated servers, so our clients never need to worry about ancient servers slowing down their sites; however, if you are hosting with GoDaddy or another budget host, you may not be so lucky.
[By Jacqueline Zenn]