UX Tips to reduce your web and mobile App load time

How long does your web and mobile App take to load?

• 3 seconds – Excellent
• 4 seconds – Very good
• 5 Seconds – Good

More than 5 Seconds, ie. 6,7,8 seconds, and so on – Not good at all

Do you know? 

A one-second delay in page load time yields

• 11% fewer page views
• 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
• 7% loss in conversions

A few extra seconds could have a significant impact on your ability to engage visitors and make sales. This means that having a fast site is essential — not just for ranking well with Google, but also for keeping your bottom-line profits high.

Would you still ignore the fact that your web or mobile App loading time is more than the standard time?

Let us first understand why a web or mobile App takes time to load

• Excessive background images and large media files 
• Unnecessary META tags and META content
• Unoptimized javascript, CSS and poorly written scripts
• Excessive overhead in your database
• Issues with caching and codes

 Hell! so many things to consider to speed-up your site. 

 But why is speed so important?

•  “The first impression is the last impression.”
• Enhances and provides a much better on-page user experience
• Affects conversion rate
• Acts as a ranking factor for the search index
• Direct impact on google ranking and bounce rate

Enough reasons!

Now let’s see how to reduce your web and mobile App load time

Avoid using too many web fonts and font styles: Popular fonts are usually already cached and open super fast. So it is easier to use them; avoid rare ones, and the best practice is to use Google fonts.

Optimize images: Images in MBs are way too big- it is a great idea to keep them well under 100kB as it would help save at least 20–100ms. Also, prefer using SVG images for flat graphics and consider using CSS image sprites where possible.

Avoid Imageless rollover buttons: If you are thinking about rollover, create interactive rollover buttons using imageless CSS! These load pretty fast.

Use Social media judiciously: Undeniably, it is one of the fastest ways to reach your target audience, but since social channel servers interact with your website servers, they have to be optimized to reduce the speed loading of your website.

Other ways you can reduce speed load time

Optimize layout- some ways in which you can optimize the layout are-

• Optimize your images and content
• Put stylesheet references at the top
• Put script references at the bottom
• Place javascript and CSS in external files

Use universal design patterns– It is easier to use universal design patterns owing to their ease of social integration, personalization, and cultural appropriateness

Optimize text for scanning– Optimizing the text for scanning delivers you not just with the best design aligning to your constraints or prioritized norms but also imports factors like efficiency, strength, reliability, productivity, and longevity.

Minimize HTTP requests– http requests impact the loading time of a website or mobile App to a great extent. There are various ways through which you can reduce the http requests-

• Delete unnecessary images and reduce image size
• Implement the lazy loading technique
• Ignore irrelevant assets on the page
• Fix broken links
• Reduce external scripts
• Use a CDN
• Enable keep-alive

Minify and combine files– Minifying and combining files helps speed up webpage download times and reduce parse times, which simplifies how servers read and or interpret the symbols within CSS and HTML coding on a given website.

Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files– Also called “Lazy Loading” — but in the context of JavaScript, asynchronous loading works by dynamically loading functions.To make use of asynchronous loading, you just need to add the “async” tag when calling the .js file. This can be done in the website’s HTML source code.

Enable browser caching– Browsers can only cache static content, and reduce bandwidth consumption, cut the number of requests to the server, improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and offer better user experience 

Reduce the number of plugins you use on your site– Too many plugins can cause unnecessary bloat that slows the website down. On the other hand, plugins that are outdated can pose a security threat and lead to compatibility issues that might impact the overall performance.

Your website and mobile Apps performance and response time are of paramount importance and is closely tied to your business success, so taking every available opportunity to improve it is worth the effort. Figuring out why your website or mobile App has lagging load times can boost both its Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and UX, resulting in better visibility and a higher conversion rate.