How Bad is Your Site’s Design, Usability, and Efficiency?

The design, usability, and efficiency of a website are the most important factors that determine success.

A successful website isn’t an easy build that can happen overnight. There are crucial factors to determine a successful, high-quality website versus one that’s doomed to remain in a dark corner of the internet, ignored by your target audience. The design, usability, and efficiency of your website are the most important factors that can determine success from a sob story, so it’s important to consider these first and foremost when building a new website for your brand.

The standard approach for building efficient and lucrative websites is to focus on user-centric design, because if a user can’t use a feature, why have it exist at all? There are a lot of reasons for users to leave your website as well, including if they can’t find the information they want quickly, if the information is hard to read, or most of all if your website loads too slowly.

Slow-loading websites are essentially the kiss of death. Your website should be loading in under two seconds, both for user experience and to improve your Google ranking. If you’re running a rather large website, perhaps it’s an e-commerce shop or booking software, it can be trickier to achieve the under-two-seconds load time. But ,it’s so important for your traffic. If your website doesn’t load within three seconds, 40% of your traffic will abandon your page. 

So how can you test and ensure your website is running efficiently to improve load time? You can work with a company like digivante.com. They can test functionality and speed, and you can also follow these tips yourself. 

Decrease the number of HTTP requests

Anytime a browser fetches a page, file, or image, it makes an HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) request. These requests can take up a significant amount of your web page’s load time – up to 80%. Requests are also limited to between four and eight simultaneous connections. Loading an entire store’s worth of assets, for example, isn’t possible. 

In order to minimize the number of HTTP requests, you can reduce the number of images you’re using where possible. Combining multiple CSS or Javascript files into one large file so they all load as one unit also helps. 

Utilize browser caching

Browser caching is helpful. It allows the assets on your website to be stored into a cache on temporary storage space. Or, onto your hard drive, meaning they’re locally stored. Rather than pulling the images from the browser, they’re available locally. This will help your website load faster after the first visit. Roughly half of your daily visitors come to your website with an empty cache. The first web page they visit (most likely the home page) will need to load quickly enough. This helps them continue to the rest of your site because of . 

Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Compress and optimize files

After removing any assets you don’t need, check the file sizes of the remaining assets on your website. It’s a common practice (though not a good one) to download stock photography and then upload them to the server without optimizing them for web, so if you notice your images are a large size, run them through an optimizer. Try and keep all your assets below 150KB for maximum efficiency. 

How Bad is Your Site’s Design, Usability, and Efficiency? appeared first on Mompreneur Media