# Development

How to Optimize Website Speed Without Sacrificing Design?

Red Rocket teamOct 25, 20244 min read

Business owners often try to find out and understand what causes a low conversion rate on a website. Some people think that it happens because of ineffective managers, while others believe that the website doesn't have enough advertising. Actually, sometimes the real reason may lie in simpler things. A common version of a higher bounce rate is the slow loading speed of the website pages. You may not even realize how annoying this can be for your potential customer.

If you think that your website takes a long time to load because of a poor internet connection, this is not the case. Speed optimization processes can help improve this figure. Want to boost website speed? This article will tell you more about how to solve website speed issues without compromising your existing design. How to Optimize-min.jpg

Why Is Your Website Loading Speed Important?

Today, people are used to the fact that all digital products are fast and clear. Facing something slow is an annoying factor that can make a user leave the platform once and for all. This person will only come back if he or she does not find the answer to the interested question on other websites.

To understand why website loading speed is so important, try to visualize a similar situation with your own example. Imagine that you need to quickly find the answer to a question you need. Certainly, you type the query into the Google search bar and choose one of the first options. When a website takes a long time to load, one of the first thoughts a user might have is that the website is broken. However, in most cases, the website simply has a slow loading speed. Anyone would definitely agree that a long wait for a website to load is annoying. Moreover, when a website takes a long time to load, you think that further interaction with that platform will take just as long.

So, what can lead to a long loading of the website? First, we want to note that slow speed is considered to be from 3 seconds or more. Experts have found that the average user is likely to leave a platform that is loaded for more than 3 seconds. Based on this, a slow speed will cause you to lose a large number of customers and your bounce rate will be too high. This can also have negative effects on search engine optimization in the future and lead to a decrease in organic traffic. It goes without saying that in such a case, achieving significant revenue generation is a very challenging task for any businessman.

How Can Speed Optimization Harm Your Design?

Now you are well aware that website loading speed is a very important success factor. Check how fast your website loads on different devices in different locations and get an average result. If this value is more than 3 seconds, it means that you need to react and do website speed optimization. Basically, speed optimization is achieved by working on the images and graphical side of a website. This is why many businesses fear that the design of their site will change after optimization. Is this the case or not?

Reducing the loading time is important, but taking it to the extreme compressing everything, and sacrificing quality is not a good idea because it can lead to having your site look really poor and unprofessional. For instance, optimizing image files by reducing the file size to low-quality JPEG can actually remove a few kilobytes but also results in blurred images with ugly noise. Similarly, disabled features and lean code may enhance the performance indices, but they also reduce functionality. That is, stripping out most of the animations and effects can increase the velocity but decrease the aesthetic appeal.

It’s always possible to get carried away in the process of optimization, in the attempt and desire to squeeze the last milliseconds off the time. One is left with a blazingly-fast site, but with such compressed graphics and stripped-down features that the conversion rates anyway plummet down. Focus on real user perception and not just the statistics that tell more of a story.

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7 Tips on How to Improve Website Speed Without Losing Design Quality?

As you have already realized, speed and also quality design are important for effective website performance. What to choose? The best option is to choose both fast loading speed and quality design for efficient operation. For this purpose, it is important to balance speed and design in website speed optimization. You may ask how this can be achieved in the easiest way possible. We have collected 7 number of useful tips for you that will help you improve website performance without degrading the created platform design.

Tip 1. Choose Appropriate Formats for Images on the Website

On a website in general, the two most common formats of images are JPEG and PNG. However, the versatile files are not the most efficient in terms of quick loading of a page or the whole website as a whole. The WebP format is a more suitable option as it is open-source and it can offer improved compression of both lossless and lossy images.

It is a fact that WebP images are up to 25-35% smaller in size compared to JPEG, PNG images, and other formats, losing little quality. This helps greatly reduce the size of files needed, thus making page loading much faster. It is also important to note that WebP supports both alpha and animation, similar to how PNGs do. The only negative, which is also a relative one, is the lack of support in some older versions of browsers. However, WebP has more than 70% support all over the world, which can be used as the main format for most sites.

Tip 2. Compress Images Without Loss of Quality

Conventional compression techniques result in a loss of picture quality, which is not favorable for a site with much design and graphic work involved. However, popular tools like ImageOptim and TinyPNG provide smart compression, maintaining the quality of the image but significantly reducing its size.

It is also crucial to note that ImageOptim helps compress JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP files by about 60-70% on average. This is achieved by optimization algorithms that strip down the image to contain only the barest of metadata and make the encoding of the image simpler. The final output looks as if it has been extracted from the original site, yet it will take a fraction of the time required to load the website.

Tip 3. Apply Lazy Load Technology

Most likely, your website loads all elements at once when a user logs into the platform. What if you change the loading principle to a gradual version? Lazy loading is an efficient technique of loading images as well as files at a slow pace and not at one time. It works like this: it calls the loading only of the objects that are in the current field of view of the user. As the users scroll down, the images and files that are too large continue to load in the background.

It is an excellent method that reduces initial loads by up to seventy percent. This way, even when there are a number of large media files lower down the page, the whole page seems to load much more quickly. Regarding the interaction, users seem to have a smooth and snappy feeling when they are using the website. This website speed optimization technique deals with images, videos, animations, ads, and any other heavy visuals and should be implemented. But mind your layouts – don’t pop things in at the last second, or things will look all disjointed.

Tip 4. Use Website Optimization Tools and Plugins

The slow loading speed of website pages is quite a popular problem among beginning businesses. That's why today there are special tools and plugins that help automate the process of image optimization. What are some useful services?

Imagify. This is a popular plugin among websites that are created in the WordPress builder. It helps to automatically reduce the size of uploaded images to the required value.
Smush. This plugin is called the king among other website image optimization tools. Why is that so? Using Smush, you can easily reduce the weight of images and turn them into WebP without compromising quality.
ShortPixel. Another tool that will help you optimize images and other design elements much easier and faster. This will all have a positive impact on the loading speed of your website.

Analyze the tools and plugins available today to choose the options that suit you best. These website optimization tools will help you automate the process and save your personal time.

Tip 5. Choose Design Elements Wisely

Obviously, nowadays websites that have animations, videos and colorful pictures are the best way to attract the attention of potential customers. However, if you have to choose between animation and fast loading speed, you should prefer the second option. This means that the visitor experience should come before jazzy looks. Determine whether each of these elements adds some real value or is merely designed to make the website look pretty.

You don't have to implement more heavy design elements on a website to be successful for the user experience. Web design trends change every year and include different techniques. Find out what simple web design trends are relevant in 2024 to grab your customers' attention and reduce loading times.

Tip 6. Optimize Caching for Website Speed

Turning on caching instructs the browser to create a cache of the site files to address the need for regular downloads when users visit the site repeatedly. This means loading times that are significantly quicker. When caching is optimally done, then the performance of your website will have greatly boosted. The timeliness of page loading will be enhanced particularly in page occasions that call for several assets.

Tip 7. Implement Content Delivery Network (CDN)

By employing the services of a CDN you will experience increased loading speeds of your website since cached copies of your website’s files are placed at different locations globally. This enables a visitor to download an asset from a server closest to him, hence there will be no lag and downloads will also be fast.

Implementing CDN is easy. You just have to select a good CDN provider and replace the site code to use new CDN URLs for all JavaScripts, stylesheets, images, and other files instead of the previous paths. When clients are accessing your pages, the CDN will serve assets from the best location available. This is relevant, especially for international sites that reach audiences from different countries and regions.

Final thoughts

As you might have already realized, website loading speed is a very important factor that affects your customers. What matters to most people is how fast they can get the information or services they need. This is why you should responsibly consider optimizing your website speed. However, if you don't want to lose the overall web design picture that you created earlier, you will have to find the perfect balance. First of all, you need to monitor your website's performance on a regular basis. You can do this by using the free Google PageSpeed Insights tool, which provides information about performance. Moreover, this tool provides a list of recommendations to address optimization issues. Pay more attention to the size of the images you embed on the website and try to compress their size.