Web Development

Web Performance: How to Improve UX

Web performance can be difficult to quantify and understand. There are a lot of factors that influence this, from slow load times to poor layout. So, everyone who owns a website should be focusing on improving their user experience (UX) as often as they can. Owners of websites can use monitoring technology from resources found at https://www.apica.io/our-technology/ so they can keep on top of any issues that can arise with web performance to make sure they can get it sorted as quickly as possible. Good user experience will make a big difference with how your audience interacts with your website. Therefore, I am going to give you some tips on how to improve your website’s UX.


Image Optimization

One of the most common assets that slows down a website loading time is images. Loading images can take up a massive amount of bandwidth because they are often large file sizes. According to the HTTPS Archive, 60% of data transferred to fetch a web page is images composed of JPEGs, PNGs and GIFs. As you can see, images take up a lot of web page bandwidth so making sure your images are optimized correctly is critical to making sure that you keep your load times low.


But how can you tell if your images need to be optimized you might ask? Performing a site audit is a great way to understand where you can improve on your website. There are tons of fantastic tools that can help you better gauge your images compression, so you do not end up putting huge files on your webpage.


An approach that can help with this, just reduce the number of images you put on your page in total. You might think that a bunch of images is going to be great because it is more visually interesting. But UX trends would disagree. Having fewer images tends to improve conversions according to Google. So keep your content varied and well balanced, try not to over index on images.


Image Compression

The smaller your file size, the better your loading time will be. Your user will have to grab less data from the server, resulting in a better user experience. Tools like Squoosh will help you manipulate images to the ideal compression levels. This tool can reduce the size of images while maintaining visual quality.


Reducing the size of your images can also be a great way to do a kind of compression of the size of your images. Making sure that your images are as small as possible, while still being visible will help reduce the data load on your website. JPEGs, PNGs and SVG files are the most common file types on websites so make sure that you reduce the size of them.


Remove Unused Images

Make sure to clean up unused assets. Make sure you take out any placeholders you might have left on the page as well, even if they are not visible, get rid of it. You can find these kinds of images by searching the display:none property in your CSS if you are not sure. Also track images that are loaded by default, but might never be displayed, like on an image carousel.


Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a web performance pattern that slows down the loading of images in the browser until the user needs to see it. Often, the image loading is triggered on scroll. Images load asynchronously on demand when a user reaches an appropriate part of the page. This method is regularly used on many content-heavy websites. Alternatively, e-commerce store owners also use website themes that are optimized to load fast. For example, Shopify business websites make use of some of the fastest loading shopify themes for a better user experience.


To summarize, the best UX practices are something that every website owner should aspire to implement in their website. It can be little things that make a huge difference to your conversions, like better optimizing images, clearing out images that are unused and taking advantage of techniques like lazy loading. With a lighter webpage you will find your users are having a easier time getting through your website.