Creative Themes Design

Design Tips to Accelerate Website Rendering

05/26/2010  |  1,484 views  |   Print This  |   Email This  | 

One of the key considerations of any website or blog design is to have the website render very fast on the internet. There are several dependencies that are outside the designer’s control. The bandwidth of the web host, the internet connection speed of the user etc. affects how fast a website renders on one’s computer.

An effective website design would make every effort to accelerate the website download speed at any optimal internet connection speed to give any website visitor a great experience!

Why is Accelerated Website Loading Important?

These 2 reasons will convince anyone why it is so important to have a website render fast:

1. Slow downloading websites offer extremely poor user experience – users often leave the site never to come back again!
2. Slow rendering websites also fare poorly with Google’s search engine ranking

You can measure the time it takes a website to load using Pingdom Tools. Simply enter your website’s URL & the free tool will show you how long it takes each element in your web page to load on the browser.

Be sure to re-check your accelerated website loading on Pingdom Tools again, after you have implemented any of these recommendations.

6 Quick Design Tips to Accelerate Website Load:

1. Balance between images, videos & text – text loads the fastest while images & videos take time to load on websites. A good design will use more text & fewer images & videos on any single page.

Images or videos can be optimized to render fast on web browsers. This takes away from the quality of the image or the video at the cost of accelerated loading.

2. Preload images & buffer videos – using various javascripts, designers can preload images. Similarly, flash videos used on websites can be programmed to buffer while the page is loading, so that the user does not experience any problems in viewing them.

A good way to use images & videos is to use thumbnails. They are small in size & you only need to load the larger, full size images or videos upon specific user requests.

3. Minify template files, HTML codes & CSS Stylesheets – minification is a technique that removes all white spaces & line breaks from the code. Since both these increase the file sizes, minification of template files & stylesheets create smaller files that load very fast.

Note: Minified code is hard to edit, so as a designer, you should keep a backup of any template or CSS stylesheet that you are minifying.

4. Minimize use of scripts or images hosted outside your domain – many times you are required to use javascripts, images or files that are hosted on other websites (example, advertising codes). Such codes slow down your website. Very often it is possible to host similar scripts on your own domain (example, many web designers now store the famous jquery.min.js file along with the template files).

Note: Many web designers also keep external scripts in the footer wherever possible so that they do not slow down the website.

5. Optimal use of database queries – if a website is using a CMS system (like WordPress for example) or interacts with a database, an effective design will re-use any type of database query. In this technique, the website fetches information from the database only a few times but uses the data more often in various ways.

Fewer times you fetch data from the database, faster your website will render on the browser.

6. Limited usage of IFRAMEs – IFRAMEs are used to load entire web pages within another page. Naturally the web page that is using multiple IFRAMEs will load slowly – slower than a similar page that is not using IFRAMEs.

These are some of the simplest design tips to create effective websites that can accelerate website loading. Some of these require caution when using, like minification or re-using database calls while the others simply require some planning before programming complex websites.

Category: Blog, Creative Designs