Traditionally, it has always been an important factor for Web Designers to consider the speed at which your page loads. Optimising images, flash and using concise source code have always helped us keep loading times down to a minimum.
It can certainly be said that web designers are now possibly taking their eye off this particular ball, due to the vast increase in broadband speeds. For the last few years we’ve seen the quality and size and design elements hugely increase with full-page backgrounds and large flash based image rotators both coming into play.
The reason for the new interest in page load times fundamentally comes down to new limitations in connection speed when connecting via mobile devices and mobile broadband.
Google’s message to web designers
Google has recently published a news article outlining the fact that page load times have a new importance, with the addition of the site speed signal in the search algorithm. Websites will now have their page checked for loading speed and indexed accordingly. Now it’s worth mentioning that the weight of importance is not necessarily very high, but still shouldn’t be over looked.
Faster loading pages will…
- Give better user experience as a whole.
- Ensure higher traffic retention, particularly on mobilie devices.
- Reduce costs of bandwidth and hosting.
At present the update has only been implemented on Google.com, but other localities will follow shortly.
Read Google post here…
Keeping page load times down
There are many ways in which we can look to bring down page loading speeds. Here are just a few methods that web designers should certainly consider…
Smaller file size for page elements
- Optimise images using Photoshop
- Optimize CSS
- Minify Javascript
Reduce HTTP Requests
Once file sizes are as low as possible, you can further the reduction of page load times by cutting down the amount of HTTP requests that take place by…
- Using CSS Sprites
- Combing Stylesheets and Javascript files where applicable
Web Script Loading
Be careful when loading in scripts, as whilst they are loading, all other http requests are blocked. Ensure that you are not loading duplicate scripts such as the JQuery library, as this can also be very resource heavy.
Check your page loading times
There are many resources, which can give you help to reduce the loading speeds, but in order to test your loading times, Google have produced this excellent firefox plugin which is freely available to web designers
