Website loading – don’t keep your visitors waiting!

The first rule of good ‘website experience’ is providing a fast loading site. In the age of superfast broadband, visitors expect instant access and will not wait, no matter how cool you think your site looks!

The route from ‘first click’ to ‘page access’ is now so fast, that a website has to load – with all its accompanying images, videos, banners and other wizzy content – in a nanosecond, or the impatient, rapid-clicking visitor will just not bother!

Having invested a great deal of time and energy into optimising your email marketing newsletter or paying out for a PPC ad campaign, you don’t want to lose the potential customer when they arrive at your site and then have to wait!

Website design has evolved very rapidly and the look of your site – and the way it functions – needs to be up to date to give your brand identity the best possible first impression in the tough competitive environment of online marketing.

The key to a fast loading web site is to minimise the use of images, which should be optimised in simple gif or jpeg format. You can also minimise the size of the image by reducing the number of colours you need from the colour palette. Tables – if used creatively- load very fast because it is just HTML code.

Animated gifs are most definitely out ! They took a long time to load and were – and are – considered very irritating. Instead, employ simple, small icons that add a little colour to draw attention. Use background images instead of big images whenever possible, especially for headers and footers.

The arguments still rage around the use of building a website in Flash and the tendency has been to minimise its application. Business owner still enthuse over how great they look but it takes time to load and can really put off visitors. Only use Flash within an HTML site if you can ensure that will it load fast!

Remember – functionality first. Before signing off on the final site design – always check its load time!