Website Speed Matters

January 28th, 2021

It would be best to think about speed as one of your website's most critical aspects from the outset. Your brand colours, written content choice of picture tone of voice page layout and mobile-friendliness are essential. Still, if your site is slow, you are losing visitors and potentially losing revenue.

When considering website speed as a crucial part of your website design, some of the suggestions we make may be counter-intuitive.

Awwward, in collaboration with Google, created a user experience hierarchy that shows what is important to users.

75% said that page speed was the most crucial factor affecting their experience, while only 24% said that design was the most critical factor.

A Great First Impression!

As business owners, we want to make a great first impression, and this can lead us to make poor design choices overall when creating a website.

Data is King in the modern world, and Google accounts for around 86% of search traffic worldwide so when they release data about how the majority of people are using websites and what they expect, we do our best to listen.

So what does the data say?

The data says that we should keep the design and layout of a website simple and we should make it as easy as possible for people to find what they are looking for. 

The more design elements, the heavier the website and the slower the loading time. Design elements are things like images, unique fonts, animations and layout. The more design elements you remove, the faster the website will load until you end up with a blank page. 

The skill is to design something that looks fantastic using the best practices achieving the maximum effect with minimal cost to load time. 

How We Solve The Problem

We choose modern tools and technologies that are already optimised, so they produce fast websites. Our preferred way of building websites is by using GatsbyJs for the website build and Netlify as our host. These two technologies work together seamlessly to create websites that load extremely fast. How they achieve this is beyond the scope of this article. 

We also devout time to learning new skills, testing websites, developing best practices and keeping our finger on the pulse. 

The internet is always moving, and we strive to roll with it. We aim to make sure that its not just our websites that are second to none we make sure our capabilities are cutting-edge too.