Hello all.
So I feel like I have stepped back in time at the moment as I struggle with poor internet connections while on the road. It is like I am back using the old dial-up modems, although, in truth, things are a lot better than that.
Those pre-broadband days taught me to be highly conscious of the download sizes of any website I built, and my recent experience has reminded me how important it still is today.
An enormous number of the sites I am trying to use require an age to load (if they load at all). It is pretty eye-opening.
My situation isn’t unique either.
Reasons to stay slim
Sure, the number of people who have no access to broadband is rapidly shrinking, but the number of people on mobile devices is skyrocketing, and they are not always on wifi.
Not that mobile access is the only reason to slim down your bloated website. There are other big motivators too.
For a start, how fast your website loads will directly impact conversion. As I covered in my 2017 blog post on the importance of performance, a 1 second delay in load time can cause a 7% drop in sales and 11% fewer page views. That makes improving the performance of your website one of the best ways of improving your conversion rate.
Then, of course, there is the impact performance has on your search engine rankings. Google has made no secret that they favor fast-loading websites, especially on mobile.
So the faster your site, the more likely people are to find it, consume your content, and act. That is a potent combination, yet many websites are just painfully slow.
Why your website is bloated
That is partly because nobody but developers care about code and, by extension, performance. Senior management will happily pay for a pretty new design but don’t understand code and so ignore it.
However, it has to be said that marketers and designers like us can often be responsible for bloated websites.
We love our video backgrounds, custom fonts, hero images, and Javascript-driven animation. In the name of engagement, brand recognition, and design delighters, we weigh our websites down with bloat when all users want are answers to their questions and complete their tasks as quickly as possible.
Please don’t misunderstand me — design matters. In 2013, I used an example of slot machines to explain that user interactions lack engagement without design. However, we need to balance this against our user’s desire to get the job done as quickly as possible.
So next time you work on a design, I would encourage you to include performance as one of your considerations. Performance is not just the responsibility of developers. They cannot correct your mistakes any more than a personal trainer can make you thin if you keep shoveling down cake!
