UX (user interface) should be your priority when designing your website. The visual appeal of a website improves user experience, but slow page speed creates a bad user experience. In this article, we address the relationship between a beautiful site and bad user experience, plus what you can do about it.
It is all about page size
Web page design with visual appeal involves big hero images, JavaScript libraries, and video players. According to research, web pages in the internet average at 2.3 MB, which is large. Most of the bulk comes from images, video players, and scripts. The researchers predict that the web page size will continue to grow.
A huge page size affects the load speed. If a page takes a long time to load, users abandon it, and very few of these users will ever visit that site again. According to a research by Hubspot, the average load time for web pages is four seconds. A great percentage of internet users may not wait that long.
Building a visually appealing and fast website
Clearly, high-quality images will have an impact on the load speed of a page, and the result is bad user experience. But you can still create a beautiful website without compromising UX. First, consult with your web designer. Ask them if there is anything that can be done to reduce the size of your web pages and discuss the consequences of making each change.
Finding the middle ground
A load time as big as 10 seconds is obviously not good, but achieving a load speed of under one second is also not easy as those media components are still necessary on a web page. The solution is to find the middle ground between speed and page size.
One way of doing that is using a tool such as first screen paint optimization. The tool will display the first sections of a web page as the rest of the page loads. You can also break down long web pages into multiple shorter ones.
If you have issues with your page load speed, hire the best web design company in Singapore. Such a company understands that visual appeal is important, but the most important thing is user experience.