How long do people have to wait for your homepage to load? If it takes more than five seconds, you are in deep trouble. Load time refers to the time that someone has to wait for your web page to load. Usually, people are inclined to wait about three seconds before considering leaving your website. Yes, your Tampa web design has to load in under three seconds to assure that your target audience will see what’s written there. And yes, it is equally important for Google’s ranking. It is a major ranking factor on the search engine.

Load time is a crucial factor in Google’s ranking. If your website isn’t optimized enough to load quickly, you are losing customers that you shouldn’t have in the first place. That’s how impactful the load time is. So, what can you do to assure that you will not lose your customers due to slow load time?

Optimize Image Sizes

High-quality photos are great, but they also take so much of your bandwidth and they are usually the culprit why your loading time takes so long. You can use a different image format such as JPEG or PNG to make sure that it won’t make the site crash. JPEG and PNG will retain good quality for the images without taking up too much space on your backend. This is especially important if your web visitors are viewing your website from their mobile devices.

Remove Auto-play Multimedia

Do you have videos and audio on your website? You should remove their auto-play function. Allow the web visitors to play the video if they want to. They shouldn’t have to use a big chunk of their data to go to your site. If they feel that they are spending too much data on your website, they might not visit it again. Make it an option to play the videos. Even though you want them to listen or watch your message, it’s more important not to annoy them.

Use White Space

White space in your Tampa web design lessens the demand for data. In this space, there is no text, no image, no nothing. It allows your visitors’ eyes to breathe. It is especially important for mobile users as white space makes it a lot easier for them not to have to strain their eyes to consume the content of a web page. So, in that sense, white space works on two levels: it makes your page more readable and it allows your page to load faster.