Web Design: Five Reasons your Website is Slow

Websites can be slow for many reasons and most of these reasons are due to the web design structure. Below you will find a number of general pointers, in relation to building your website to cope with modern day website speed issues. While these issues are basic, many web designers fail to tick the boxes, leading to problems as the website grows.

1. Heavy Web Design Structure

Web design is a very technical subject matter that takes years to master. These days many web designers use shortcuts like frameworks, packed with functionality that is not needed for the particular web design they are building. Many modern web designers do not fully understand the basics like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Python. Instead they jump straight into jQuery, Rails and Django. Web designers, who have not mastered the basics of web design and adopted a strategy of “making do”, find themselves building heavy slow website designs.

2. Large Images in the Web Design

Large, high definition images are fantastic but they do tend to slow your website down. To see how large a problem this really is on your website, logon to Google Search Console and take a look. By compressing some of these images you could double the speed of your website.

3. Large Videos in the Web Design

It’s not that common these days with all the fantastic video hosting services like YouTube and Vimeo but in the old-days web designers tried to host large format video files directly on the website. This for obvious reasons slowed the website down considerably. For anyone still doing this, the solution is easy. Find a video hosting service that meets your needs and use it.

4. Website Templates

A one-page website template logically should have around 10 to 15 unique URL’s when you take into account an individual blog section, maybe an individual contact section and possibly a portfolio section. The fact is that many of these website templates try to cater for all design possibilities and build all these possibilities into the back-end of the website template. Recently I came across a one-page website with 449 unique URL’s that loaded each and every time the website was opened.

5. Website Cache Optimisation

So many web designers overlook such a simple thing like cache optimisation. Why reload static content over and over again? This content can be cached on the user’s browser saving download time and ultimately improving the user experience. Optimising the cache will indeed speed your website up. If you are experiencing any issues with your web design and need help. BigNet Design offers a full web design service in Dublin. Contact us on (01) 6629398.