[author: Noreen Fishman]
Page speed is one of the most important components of your website. Not only does a faster load time improve the user experience, but it can also be viewed as a factor for search engines. If you’ve been looking for ways to reduce your bounce rate and increase visitor engagement, consider optimizing your site for speed. Here are 9 ways to improve page load times with website design for law firms.
Website Design for Law Firms
What You Need to Know About Page Speed and Website
Design for Law Firms
Essentially, page speed refers to how quickly content loads when someone visits a page on your website. The term is not interchangeable with website speed, since page speed refers to a specific page only. There are a lot of things that can influence page speed, including the number of images and videos, which plugins are installed, and specific coding.
Page speed is important because when it comes to website visits, every second counts. Research from Google stated that when loading times are increased from one to three seconds, the likelihood of a bounce increases by 32%. For pages that take up to 5 seconds, the probability of a bounce increases by 90%. Page speed also plays an essential role in search engine optimization. Speed is an important ranking factor for Google across both desktop and mobile web pages.
Before you do anything to improve page speed with website design for law firms, you need to understand how pages are currently performing. There are a variety of tools to help you measure page speed, but we suggest beginning with Google PageSpeed Insights. Simply enter the URL of the web page you want to check, and then select the “Analyze” button. You’ll get a score ranging from 0 – 100. You can also get a list of suggestions for improving page speed where needed.
9 Tips for Improving Page Speed Loading Times with Website Design for Law Firms
1. Make Sure Your Hosting Solution is Optimized for Performance
The hosting provider you use can make a big difference in load times. Don’t settle for a mediocre hosting option to save some money. It will hurt your performance over time. Look for a powerful platform that’s designed to help with speed.
2. Compress Images
Images can really help to enhance website design for law firms, but they should be optimized. Large images will delay loading times. Tactics like changing file formats, enabling lazy loading, and compressing images through lossy or lossless compression can all be beneficial. There are a variety of tools that you can use for this purpose, but the important thing is to check all of your images for their impact.
3. Limit Your Redirects
Too many redirects on your website can ultimately hurt performance. Any time a page redirects to another one, it prolongs the HTTPS request. Redirects will always be necessary sometimes, but looking for and eliminating extra redirects is a good practice.
4. Cache Web Pages
Caching is still one of the best tips on website design for law firms. This will store copies of your site’s pages, which reduces the work that a server needs to do to display them. You can do this at the server level, where the host does the work, or you can use a caching plugin.
5. Enable Browser Caching
Another type of caching involves allowing the browser to store a variety of information such as stylesheets, images, and JavaScript files. This means the system won’t have to reload the page every time and things can move faster. You can find a caching plugin to complete this process.
6. Understand Asynchronous Loading
Your site is composed of CSS and JavaScript files that can load synchronously or asynchronously. Synchronously means that files will load one at a time, in the order that they appear on your web page. On the other hand, asynchronous loading enables multiple files to load at the same time, which can really improve your page’s performance. Understanding the difference is key when looking to improve website design for law firms.
7. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
If you optimize the way your pages load, you will naturally improve page speed. To do so, remove unnecessary spaces, characters, comments, or other elements that you don’t need, in order to reduce the size of files. Decreasing your files’ sizes results in cleaner code and leaner web pages that can load more quickly.
8. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
You may also hear this called a content distribution network, and it’s essentially a network of servers designed to improve page loading speed. This happens when the CDN hosts and delivers copies of your site’s static content from servers located across the globe. A CDN works alongside your host to maximize performance.
9. Get Rid of Unneeded Plugins
Having unnecessary plugins on your site can really slow things down. This is especially true of outdated or poorly maintained plugins. The easiest thing to do is to disable and delete any plugins that you’re not currently finding useful.
Takeaway:
The important thing to remember is that every second your website takes to load is a hindrance to visitors on your site. Visitors bouncing essentially translates to losing leads. If you’d like to avoid that with website design for law firms, try using these tips to minimize load times and improve performance.
