We’ve all experienced the joys of staring at a computer screen or mobile device while embracing the warm glow of the benevolent loading screen. Wait no… no we haven’t. Usually when you need information the quicker the better. A lot of people would agree considering that 47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. Up to 40% will abandon the site all together if they have to wait more the three seconds. This can hurt your bottom line. When people don’t even bother to stick around to see what your site has to offer, you lose out on conversions.
Have you noticed this problem on your own site? Are you worried that you are missing out on sharing your message or service to potential patients? If you are experiencing these problems, try out these four tips to optimize your site for the best possible load time.
1. Optimize images and design elements.
When the site begins to load, it has to load all the images from the entire site. This is how the user can actually see them. This process can take a lot of bandwidth, which in turn slows down the load time of the site. Make sure to optimize your images to be web friendly by reducing the resolution or size, by using an image editor. Don’ts use unnecessary large sized images and plan ahead when selecting your images and design elements.
2. Javascript and CSS files should be external files.
They should not be directly placed into your HTML. This allows your browser to cache these files and will reduce page load time. You should also place any javascript files at the end of the body or use the ‘async’ attribute to load them asynchronously. If there is an error in your javascript files and you try to load them first, you might cause your page to render improperly or not at all.
3. The less HTTP requests the better.
If you can reduce the number of image requests by using CSS Sprites it will speed up your load time for images. This is because you are making one request for an image that contains a variety of the images that you actually need. You should also consider combining javascript files together, as well as combining CSS files. Every time you load an image, javascript file or CSS file, your browser makes a request for the files and has to wait for a response. These requests can significantly bog down your load time if not managed properly.
4. Reduce the size of cookies.
Cookies are used to store data that needs to persist between requests. This data is sent on every request and adds to the load time when it’s big. By reducing the size of the cookies you reduce the size of the data that is transferred, and decrease the page load time. Eliminate unnecessary cookies or reduce the size of the cookies.
