Web Design Archives - Abstrax Web

How to Make Your Website Faster

What’s more terrible than a slow internet connection? A website that takes a long time to load completely. In the struggle to make web design more appealing to visitors, many webmasters and web developers end up creating websites loading slowly.

If you’re not thinking about how to make your site run faster, think again. A slow website places your business at a disadvantage, even if your digital marketing strategy is excellent. In fact, a slow-loading web page results in fewer and disappointed visitors and might impact your SEO ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).

This article will explore proven tips on how to improve website loading speed and get the best results for your brand. Read on to find out.

Why Do You Need to Improve Website Loading Speed?

A fast-loading web page is crucial to your online campaign. But why is faster page speed important? We look at the reasons below:

1. User Experience

Your prospective visitors are more likely to engage and interact with your content or purchase an item if the process is faster. For instance, if the checkout pages take a long time to load completely, they may be tempted to leave and patronize another brand.

This same scenario plays out if they want to fill out a form, save an item to their cart, or browse through different web pages on your website. Thus, you should make your website faster to improve your user experience.

2. Conversions

Every webmaster wants to generate more leads and conversions on their website. One of the best ways to do that is to increase loading speed. According to research, a 0.1-second improvement in your google page performance will increase your funnel progression and conversion rates.

3. Web Page Usage

The usability of your website depends on how fast does your website load. Users cannot take quick actions if web design elements such as buttons, menus, and navigation panels don’t load quickly.

Thus, it is important to check website loading time and plan how to make your site run faster.

4. SEO Considerations

Search engines such as Google consider faster page speed and user experience when ranking websites on local and national SERPs.

Thus, if your website isn’t ranking higher on local searches, you may have to think of how to load page faster.

Ways to Improve Website Speed

According to a survey, 47% of online customers expect a web page to load completely in 2 seconds or less. Thus you’d have to include how to speed up web page loading and other digital marketing strategies.

How do you ensure google ranking site performance for speed? Practice the following tips:

Compress Images

One of the issues that might hamper your website loading speed is your images. High-quality and large images make a site look beautiful. However, they are one of the major causes of websites loading slowly.

One of the foolproof ways on how to improve website loading speed is to compress and optimize your website images. But do you know how to make photo loads faster on website? Practice these steps:

● Save your pictures in JPG formats instead of PNG.

● Only use PNG formats for web design or graphics.

● Use SVG formats for your logos and shapes.

● Install WP Smush plugin for your website to reduce your image sizes and weights without affecting their quality.

● Use manual compression tools such as Tinypng, Squoosh, or Attrock.

Reducing and compressing your website images will speed up website.

Remove Popups

Animated GIFs make your website come alive. But at the same time, they happen to slow website loading speed. Take a critical look at your website and ascertain if the popups are too many.

You should remove unnecessary popups or place them down the page. You can also reduce each popup’s number of frames and resize the dimension to increase your page speed score.

Sometimes, less is more. Try simplifying your website by removing popups to enable you to reload web pages faster.

Remove Ads

Another reason your website may be loading slowly is the number of ads on the web page. Uploading ads on the web page is another way of grabbing your visitors’ attention. However, when there are too many on a web page, it takes several seconds to load completely.

Review your website to limit the ads to only a few per page. The fewer ads, the faster page speed.

Delete Unnecessary Plugins

Another way you can increase loading speed of your website is to remove unnecessary plugins. Incorporating too many plugins on your website can significantly hamper its loading speed.

More so, outdated plugins pose a cybersecurity threat and compatibility errors, slowing down page speed. Review the plugins on your website and disable or delete anyone you don’t need.

Caching

Caching is also another way you can improve your page speed. It is simply the process of storing the content of your website on the users’ browser and displaying it the exact way when they visit with the same browser again.

Caching is essential to reload web pages faster, delivering the same content for repeat visitors. Thus, the server will require less time to reload the same web pages. There are several ways to cache your website. They include:

● Activating it on the server level for the host to handle it.

● Use a free caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache and activate it by navigating to General Settings > Page Cache > Enable.

Minimize JavaScript, CSS, and HTML

Your website comprises programming languages and codes such as CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. A lot of these codes on your website can cause your web pages to load slowly.

You should minimize these codes by removing unnecessary elements and spaces to lower the size of your web page. You can use Closure Complier and Uglify JS2 to minimize JavaScript, HTML minifier to minimize HTML, and CSSNano and csso to minimize CSS.

How to Test Website’s Loading Speed

How fast does your website load? You may not know the answer to that if you don’t conduct a test. There are several free tools available to test the loading speed of your website.

One of such tools is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It shows you your page speed score for mobile and PC devices.

According to the platform:

● 0 to 19 is Slow.

● 50 to 89 is Moderate.

● 90 to 100 is Fast.

You can use PageSpeed Insights to check the page speed of your competitors’ websites and deploy those strategies mentioned above to speed up website.

Other tools include:

● Pingdom.

● WebPageTest.

● Uptrends.

● Google Mobile Site Speed Test.

● GTMetrix

How Website Speed Impacts Your Business and SEO

Ensuring your website ranks higher on local SERPs goes beyond optimizing your website for specific keywords. In an official blog post, Google highlighted that site speed is also considered for ranking higher on local and national SEO. Thus, if your website’s loading speed is slow, it won’t rank higher on local searches.

Faster page speed improves the user experience of your customers and visitors. When a web page is slow, users will leave and visit a competitor’s website. It also increases your leads and conversions as users can navigate smoothly across your web pages.

If your web page doesn’t load quicker, you lose out on customers and visitors. Thus, you should implement strategies to improve your website speed.

Make Your Website Faster for Better Ranking

Knowing how to improve website loading speed is essential to SEO and your business’s bottom line. Practice these tips to increase loading speed of your website:

● Compress images.

● Minimize coding languages.

● Remove unnecessary ads and plugins.

● Implement caching.

● Remove ads.

These strategies are bound to speed up website in no time.

Conclusion

Page speed is an essential aspect of ranking higher on local and national SEO. You need to increase loading speed if your website is loading slowly. Thankfully, we’ve proven steps on how to make my blog load faster. So, what are you waiting for?

Web Design

What is Visual Hierarchy?

As the world gets introduced to new technologies, the need for user interfaces to improve persists. One of the key components to make this possible is visual hierarchy.

Visual hierarchy is simply the concept of arranging visual principles to reveal their order of relevance. By ranking these elements, you influence users’ perception of the design and direct them to take desired actions.

For instance, if you land on a website that doesn’t have visual cues to navigate different page sections, you end up dissatisfied and leave. Bottom line? The site owner is dealing with a deficient visual hierarchy.

Visual hierarchy in design involves using principles such as scale, menu icons, balance, color, contrast, and more to establish different elements cohesively. It makes any design more pleasing to the eye while improving information.

This article will explore everything you need to know about the concept, including the arrangement and placement of elements on an image or design.

How To Create Visual Hierarchy

Creating and establishing a visual hierarchy in design might be confusing if you’re a beginner or intermediate designer. There are several styles, and it can be mentally and physically exhausting to decide.

Visual hierarchy design isn’t difficult to practice. You simply need to know the basic rules and apply them consistently as you practice. We address them below.

1. Scale or Size

One of the best ways to create a visual hierarchy is to punctuate the size of one of the elements in your design. It could be a headline, photo, illustration, or other content.

Below is a typical example of scaling/sizing for the headline ‘The Washington Post.’ You know this is a news website without peering at the other content.

Above the headline, you can spot other details such as news content on tech, the war in Ukraine, coronavirus, politics, sports, and other sections. The pictures attached to the news headlines also set the atmosphere for the website.

2. Color

Another rule to consider when creating visual hierarchy in design is to infuse colors strategically. For beginners, it is essential to create mood boards and infuse color combinations to bring cohesiveness to your design.

Take a look at the following design:

The design doesn’t only look fresh but also appears vintage. The colors on the letterings help sell the idea that old is gold. The background color creates the mood and helps the can drinks stand out. That’s a visual hierarchy in full light.

3. Negative Space

Another way you can create a visual hierarchy in web design is to arrange your elements perfectly in a negative space. Novice or beginner designers often mistake filling every negative space (whitespace) with designs.

Take a look at the design below:

Notice how the designer took advantage of the negative space in the design. It looks random but maintains asymmetry that flows throughout the web design. When creating a graphic design visual hierarchy, infuse multiple options but proper spacing for users to easily navigate the web page.

4. Alignment

Alignment is a crucial design concept in the visual hierarchy. Alignment is the process of placing an element considering the placement of other elements via the use of grid lines. One of the vital aspects of web design and development is grids.

The example below explores this perfectly.

What Can Be Used To Improve Visual Hierarchy

When creating a visual hierarchy in web design, you don’t have to rely on the basic rules highlighted in the previous section. You also need to practice and learn to improve yourself in the field.

You should deploy several considerations to improve yourself in the craft. They include:

● Purpose. You need to understand that each design is a key component in user interaction and experience. Thus, every design should have a point, and you should ascertain their importance and rank them accordingly.

● Users’ priorities. As much as you want your audience to understand your information on a design, you should not overstuff everything. Define which elements are important and showcase them.

● Style. Understand that some fonts are more appropriate for some designs and others aren’t. You should not mix them up, as it will distract your audience and turn their attention to criticism.

● UI/UX specifics. If you are working on a smaller design, ensure that your elements can be spotted right away. For larger designs, you should properly space each element to convey cohesiveness.

Visual Hierarchy Tools

When creating a visual hierarchy design, several tools to work with. While we explored some of the tools in the previous section, we go into it in detail here.

● Colors. One of the components that have a strong influence on design is color. It shapes the perception of your audience. It is divided into bold colors such as black, red, yellow, and soft colors such as cream, white, and rose gold.

● Contrast. When designing, you’d want to create differences between elements. And that is the contrast in play.

● Negative space (whitespace). This is the area between different elements in a design. Negative spaces are used to create appropriate composition in a design.

● Repetition. The act of replicating a style across different elements in a design. Designers use repetition to unify various objects.

● Size. When an element in a design is larger, more importance is placed on it from an audience perspective. Sizing your elements is the way to go if you want to grab attention.

● Proximity. This is simply the act of placing multiple elements together so that it is unified.

What is Visual Hierarchy in Web Design?

Visual hierarchy in web design is the process of arranging and presenting elements to influence your audience’s perception. When a user spots a design, they should be able to organize several elements in the design into an ordered group and make logical conclusions.

But for this to work, visual hierarchy needs to work with functionality. For instance, it fails if a website is appealing but not functional in directing users to do something.

Visual Hierarchy Advertising

Competition is rife amongst brands today. As brands compete for supremacy, you must put your best foot forward in producing the best designs and stand out.

In visual hierarchy advertising, you need to consider your goals. What are you planning to achieve with your design? This question should drive you to make a design that will be consistent with its intended purpose.

Another factor you need to consider is your audience. Are you dealing with teens, young adults, or seniors or catered to a larger audience? Your design should be able to reflect that before publishing it.

Visual Hierarchy UI

You cannot take visual hierarchy from UI. Virtual hierarchy UI comes into play in the arrangement and placement of elements on an image.

It can help structure your information architecture to help your users move around a website or product easier. Thus, it reduces the time of searching around before uncertainty builds in.

Graphic Design Visual Hierarchy

Graphic design is all about inputting information and conveying it so that your intended gets it immediately.

The average attention span of humans is 8 seconds. Graphic design visual hierarchy should be able to pass a message in an even shorter time to get the user interested in perusing an entire design.

Successful graphic designs are designs that convey intended information the right way. The visual hierarchy should reflect that.

Visual Hierarchy Examples

This section looks at some of the best examples of designs that reflect visual hierarchy.

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