The Importance of Time in Web Design: Part 1
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There are many resources exchanged with your website’s visitors, but the one almost always given to you is time. Time is a precious, non-renewable commodity that should be well-managed once in your hands, and your efforts will be rewarded in a variety of ways.
One optimization that you can make to your site is to make your pages load faster. By decreasing your load time, you will likely decrease your bounce rate. A delay beyond 2 seconds increases the rate that users abandon a site, and each second raises that likelihood by 5.8%. You will also increase your web search ranking. Google has previously mentioned that site load speed directly affects page rank, so this will also benefit your SEO efforts. This helps to create a better experience for visitors overall. Faster load times let visitors get to desired content faster, and will help with issues that mobile users typically face on spotty cellular connections or unreliable public WiFi.
3 Ways to Reduce Your Load Time
- Reduce the size of your images. A typical webpage is about 2MB, most of which is traditionally used up by images. There are several services that will decrease the size of your images without reducing quality, or HDMZ can rework your site’s images within a few days.
- Reduce the use of custom fonts. Site visitors have to download fonts on the first visit if they are not already installed on their machine. A typical font package can be as large as 200KB (~10% of average page size), so tightening the belt here can quickly improve load times by up to 10%!
- Use a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a network of servers that host your web content in different geographical locations. As fast as data transmission speeds are getting, they are not instant, so having your visitors physically closer to your network helps to speed up their load times.
How are your visitors going to use all of their new-found free time? We can’t wait to hear how you plan to give some of this precious resource back to them! Drop us a line at webmaster@hdmz.com to let us know, and feel free to reach out if you would like assistance on any of these time-saving measures.
