[author: Jamie Granger]
Page speed is one of the most important components of your website. A faster load time not only improves the user experience, but can also be seen as a factor for search engines. If you’ve been looking for ways to reduce your Bounce percentage and increase visitor engagement, consider optimizing your site for speed. Here are 10 ways to improve page load times with web design for law firms.
Web design for law firms
What you need to know about page speed and website design for law firms
Basically, page speed refers to how quickly your content loads when someone visits a page on your website. The term is not interchangeable with website speed, as page speed only refers to a specific page. There are many things that can influence page speed, including the number of images and videos, installed plugins, and specific coding.
Page speed is important because when it comes to website hits, every second counts. Google research indicated that when load times increase from one to three seconds, the likelihood of a bounce increase 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 on both desktop and mobile web pages.
Before you do anything to improve page speed with law firm website design, you need to understand how pages currently work. There are a variety of tools to help you measure page speed, but we recommend starting with Google PageSpeed Insights. Simply enter the URL of the web page you want to check, then select the “Scan” button. You’ll get a score ranging from 0 to 100. You can also get a list of suggestions to improve your page speed when needed.
10 Tips to Improve Page Load Times with Law Firm Website Design
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 money. It will hurt your performance over time. Look for a powerful platform designed to help you with speed.
2. Compress images
Images can really help improve website design for law firms, but they need to be optimized. Large images will slow down load times. Tactics such as changing file formats, enabling lazy loading, and compressing images using lossy or lossless compression can be beneficial. There are a variety of tools you can use for this purpose, but the important thing is to check their impact on all your images.
3. Limit your redirects
Too many redirects on your website can hurt performance. Every time one page redirects to another, it lengthens the HTTPS request. Redirects will always be necessary at times, but looking for and removing extra redirects is a good practice.
4. Web page cache
Caching remains one of the best web design tips for law firms. This will store copies of your site’s pages, which reduces the work a server has 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 the browser cache
Another type of caching involves allowing the browser to store a variety of information such as style sheets, 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 cache plugin to complete this process.
6. Understand asynchronous loading
Your site is made up of CSS and JavaScript files that can be loaded synchronously or asynchronously. Synchronously means that files will be loaded one at a time, in the order they appear on your web page. On the other hand, asynchronous loading allows multiple files to be loaded at the same time, which can really improve your page’s performance. Understanding the difference is key when it comes to improving law firm website design.
7. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Optimizing the way your pages load will naturally improve your page speed. To do this, remove spaces, characters, comments or other unnecessary elements that you don’t need, in order to reduce the file size. Reducing file sizes results in cleaner code and simpler web pages that load faster.
8. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
You may also hear this called a content delivery network, and it’s essentially a network of servers designed to improve page load speed. This happens when the CDN hosts and delivers copies of your site’s static content from servers located around the world. A CDN works together with your host maximize performance.
9. Get rid of unnecessary plugins
Having unnecessary plugins on your site can really slow things down. This is especially true for outdated or poorly maintained plugins. The easiest thing to do is to disable and delete any plugins that you don’t currently find useful.
10. Optimize mobile responsiveness
Make sure your law firm website design is not only visually appealing on desktop, but also optimized for fast and seamless loading on mobile devices. With an increasing number of users accessing websites via smartphones, prioritizing mobile responsiveness can significantly improve User experience and improve page speed load times on multiple devices.
Take away:
The most important thing to remember is that every second it takes for your website to load is an obstacle for your site visitors. Bouncing visitors basically translates into lost potential customers.
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