If your website has a loading screen it is too slow!

We’ve all seen them. Those websites that have some kind of animation that plays before you actually get to see the website, but have you ever stopped to think what their purpose is?

For the most part they are there so that something is happening on the screen, keeping your attention, while the website loads behind the scenes, and that’s the problem.

For a long time we’ve talked about how you only have a couple of seconds to get the attention of visitors to your website, and now Google is using page speed as one of it’s key ranking metrics, speed is of utmost importance.

Think about some websites you have seen that have a loading screen and how much time you sit there just waiting for the page to load. Some sites just have one for the home page, that’s bad enough, but others have a loading screen for every single page load - these can lead to so much wasted time waiting for content to load, and if you’re anything like me you’ll just get bored and just move on to the next site. If your website has a loading screen just how much business are you missing out on?

There are many reasons a website can be slow. Some contributing factors can be:

• The server your site is hosted on.

• The website has been poorly developed (coded).

• You have too many plugins and add ons that slow things down. Do you really need all the plugins you have installed?

• Poor image formatting.

So rather than have a loading screen to hide the fact your website is slow there are a heap of things you can do to speed up your site:

• Make sure your web host is up to scratch and the server your website is on is located locally to your customers (e.g  for Australian businesses it should be in Australia).

• Find a good developer who understands all aspects of web development.

• Reduce the number of plugins you use. So often a plugin isn’t required - like do you really need a plugin to add Google Analytics to your website? NO!

• Understand all aspects of image management. Learn how to edit and process images appropriately for the web.  I often see a 6mb image loading and being displayed the size of a postage stamp. I often see a 6mb image loading and being displayed the size of a postage stamp.

• Use caching on your site. Not every resource needs to be loaded every time someone visits your site.

At Mity we have been using a new breed of CMS for a while now called Statamic. One of the major benefits of Statamic is it’s speed. It has excellent caching and it’s efficient in how it is coded and runs and this makes it lightning fast!. 

Check out a recent post we wrote all about it, and let's work together to stamp out loading screens!.