Master Website Performance Design: Best Practices, Pitfalls to Avoid, and Key Checks

Okay let’s agree, we’ve all been there, you click on a website, and it takes more than an eternity to load. Frustrating, right? Chances are, you’re closing that tab within seconds.

Guess what? Your visitors feel the same they’ve been there too at-least once in their life and they are already out of there. And no, it’s not just about having a fast server. Your website’s design plays a huge role in its performance and speed.

Why Should You Care About Website Performance?

First impressions matter. When someone lands on your site, speed is one of the first things they notice. A slow website is like walking into a resturant where it takes forever to get service—you’ll probably walk right back out.

But here’s the thing—performance isn’t just about user experience, it will also affect your google rankings, google loves fast website performance, so if you’re having a slow website performance, google is going to downrank you superfast.

How Website Design Affects Speed

Now you may think that you’ve got a good server, then why your site is running slow? the reason maybe some poor designing choices and decisions, and I can confirm this being a passionate web designer myself for all my life.

Too Many Fancy Elements

Yupp, those animations you got there are really cool, and talking bout cool, those high-res shiny images, and those videos you’ve put on your website looks cooler, but ain’t they the reason why your website is so slow? Your design needs to strike a balance between being visually appealing and not weighing your site down with heavy elements. Simplify where you can!

Unoptimized Images

Images are often one of the biggest culprits for slowing down websites. If your images aren’t optimized (or if they’re way too large), they can eat up precious loading time. Compress your images without losing quality—tools like TinyPNG can help with that.

Too Many Plugins or Scripts

Plugins are great for functionality, but too many of them can clog your site’s speed. Keep things lean and only use what’s absolutely necessary. The more scripts running in the background, the slower things get.

Poorly Coded Design

The code behind your design matters—a lot. A well-coded site runs smoothly, while messy or bloated code can drag down your performance. If you’re using templates or themes, make sure they’re optimized for speed.

Best Practices for a Fast Website Design

Now that we’re done with what can go wrong, let’s cover on what can be done to make them right, and what else can be done to add that cherry on the top:

Mobile-First Design Aproach

These days, as more and more people are using mobile devices to browse the web, and most of the traffic is coming from the small screens, so it’s very important to have your website optimised for those small screens, so that the website look and feel good, as well as load fast.

Use Lazy Loading

Loading everything at once can significantly increase the loading time of a website, think of how many images and other heavy files it has to load, so that’s why it’s good to implement lazy loading on your website, this will make the website load as much content as the user can see, more of the content gets loaded as the user scrolls down.

Minimize Redirects

Every time your site has to redirect a user, it adds an extra layer request adding up to that already infinite loading time. Keeping your redirects minimum will avoid any unnecessary delays.

Clean and Optimize Your Code

Unused code is like some half eaten leftover food, which if not removed and disposed of properly will attract cockroaches and mice to your house, and make you sick. Similarly, these unnecessary pieces of code will make your website slow as sick.

Change to a Fast and Reliable Hosting

Time for the final cherry on the top, the eternity old saying- “if you’ve tried everything else, blame it on the server”, that’s true, if you’ve actually tried everything I mentioned above, then it’s best to know that your server is no longer able to hold your heavy website with it’s weak feeble legs, and it’s time for a protein shake to your server, I mean it needs some input to upgrade, time to spend your money!

Tools to Measure and Improve Your Site’s Speed

Now that you’ve followed through all the steps, time to see the result, wait the website performance does look faster, but how fast is it exactly? are there any numbers to compare? Yupp, there are tools to measure the speed of your website, I’m mentioning some of them here.

Google PageSpeed Insights: This tool gives you a speed score and info on how to improve your website performance. It’s a good place to start.

GTmetrix: Another great tool that breaks down your site’s performance and gives you a detailed report on what’s slowing you down.

Pingdom: A simple tool that provides insights into your site’s speed and performance, showing what’s causing delays.

Why Performance is Key for Conversions

People don’t just leave a slow website—they’re less likely to trust it. Slow load times can make your brand look unprofessional. On the other side, fast websites make users feel confident, encouraging them to stay long and take the action you want them to take, like buying your product or signing up to your newsletter, or maybe getting a quote, and achieving the ultimate goal in the process, that is making profit.

Wrapping It Up: Good Design equals to Great Performance

And just as linking park said “One thing, I don’t know why, it doesn’t even matter how hard you try”, but in the end, it doesn’t even matter, I mean to have both looks and performance in your website, your website performance is a direct reflection of its design, and if you only focus on the looks, you’ll miss out that feeling of 319mph speed on your website. So, while it’s tempting to load your site up with every cool feature under the sun, keep it lean and mean for the best results, and if you need a shoulder to rely on to make your website performance superfast, I’m right here, chat with me, or checkout our services.