Speeds importance to Usability
Introduction
The purpose of this article is to understand how the design of a website can affect the speed based on multiple factors that are on the website as well as elements that will affect load speeds of web pages. This article will discuss what speed is when it comes to websites and what web designers should consider when creating websites to ensure that the usability of the website is not affected by the speed.
Understanding Speed in Web Usability
Website speed can be defined as “how quickly a browser is able to load fully functional webpages from a given site” it is one of the most important factors that should be considered when designing a website to have a usable site.
Impact of Speed on Usability
Speed is a vital part of usability this isn’t just the load times of the website but also the speed in which a user can find items that they are looking for. To ensure that a website has this, every website should have a user interface that is easily learnable and understandable for the end user. Research has also shown that having images can affect loading times of webpages taking the page to load in longer than 5 seconds this could cause the user to stop using the website if the website isn’t loading in a time that they believe to be reasonable. A possible solution to having images on you site while still having a fast load time would be to use lower resolution images that don’t take up as much bandwidth for the user to download.
The speed on websites is also an issue for businesses. Research on Amazon has shown that for every 100ms, it causes a 1% drop in revenue. While it has been shown for Google that a 0.5 second delay causes a 20% drop in purchases. This shows that users load times directly effect how many users your site will receive should be a priority when creating a website. Especially is your website is a business where if your website is too slow, it will likely cause a loss in revenue, but if your website is faster than your competitors, you could see an increase in revenue.
Techniques to optimise speed
Embedding content such as YouTube videos and having lots of CSS are two major factors in consuming bandwidth as well as load times for websites. When creating a website, you should consider minimising the amount of this content. Caching is a method of still having a lot of content on your site while still having good load times. This works by downloading elements of a website in the background to the users computer so the next time the user visits the site, they will not have to download these elements again which will lead to faster loading times.
Conclusion
In conclusion, speed of websites is a vital component in the usability of websites and should be a top priority to all web designers to that they can maximise the amount off users that use their site and can increase the users experience which could lead to them recommending the website to others.