One of the essential factors of website design is speed and security. The end user wants a hassle-free, Quick and safe browsing experience and search engines like Google will favour websites that load quick and meet safety standards over sites that lag behind security and page loading standards.

Things like basic encryption (SSL or TLS Certificates, HTTPS), optimisation (image compression and file type, removal of web elements that slow things down) and a sturdy content delivery network can significantly improve page Load Times and provide a good level of security from threats like hacking, ID theft, phishing etc.

There are some big benefits to these improvements: Google vastly prefers quick and safe sites and will rank you higher than normal, and website visitors will use sites that load quickly and look safe, with page load times being a deciding factor in people abandoning a purchase.

For encryption, you can quickly grab an SSL or TLS certificate from sites like Let’s Encrypt, which has provided trustworthy SSL certificates for 100 million sites as of June this year. A free service, Let’s Encrypt can provide the security your site needs for HTTPS quickly, as well as lay the groundwork for HTTP/2. HTTP/2 is a performance improvement over standard HTTP protocols, as it will load website resources all in one go, reducing the page-load experience for the user considerably. Setting up HTTP/2 for your site is a must if it’s particularly resource-heavy.

Next is a data compression algorithm called Brotli, developed by Google in 2015. Brotli has gained rapid acceptance in web design and nearly all browsers support it (IE being the main exception), as it offers a significant performance improvement over its biggest rival, Gzip. Page load times can be further reduced with the WebP image file type, which can reduce the size of JPEGs with no appreciable loss in quality.

Our last suggestion is to use a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN accelerates web assets globally by caching them across a cluster of servers. When a website uses a CDN, it essentially offloads most of its traffic to the CDN’s edge servers and routes its visitors to the nearest CDN server. This helps reduce connection latency, especially if the user is trying to access your website from a location far away from the server.

These suggestions can be a quick fix and a boost to your website’s performance, which in turn can improve traffic, boost search ranking and give your end users some confidence that your website is safe. Chetaru is a web design and development agency based in Darlington that is excited about building a better future with the latest technological and IT solutions available. Chetaru has the IT know-how that your firm needs to succeed and thrive, from beautiful responsive websites to economical SEO services and useful mobile app designs.

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