Many people that have taken on the task of putting up a website do not realize that visitors are not always very patient, especially when it comes to page loading. If the site is running slowly, people who come across it are likely to become frustrated and leave, with rare revisits in the future. If you want your photography to be exposed to as many individuals as possible, it is important to put in the work to make sure everything loads as fast as you can manage. But how can this be achieved? What does a designer need to do have a fast loading photography website? The below tips should be consulted.
- Part of creating a website involves coming up with a layout for it. A good number of designers believe that layouts should be as fancy as possible; these designers assume that they need to show off each and every trick they have learned, thinking this will impress any and all visitors. In truth, a lot of content will only slow down the web browser. With so much information to read, it will take longer for everything to load, which includes photography images. Simple layouts are something to strive for.
- Another mistake that people tend to make involves displaying images in large formats. In other words, photographs in their original big dimensions are shown on one page, with absolutely no tweaking involved. This choice can lead to a lot of dissatisfaction, and loading proves to be a prolonged chore. The more sizable the image, the harder the browser needs to work to get it to appear. Nobody wants their photographs to take forever to show up, and this can be avoided by linking to the larger images with smaller images. These are also known as gallery thumbnails. Not only does it take up less room on the page, but they show up quicker and more sufficiently.
- If you want your photos to load as fast as they should, be careful about what format they have been saved under. The most popular formats include JPEG, PNG and GIF; however, this does not mean that they are all ideal for photographs. JPEG has been marked as good for photographs, along with images of true-color. A GIF works best if it is utilized for small images such as buttons and gallery thumbnails. By lessening the file size of the image, loading proves to be less of a problem for visitors.
- Finally, on top of the above tips, those that wish to be successful with their website should always include information such as the height and width of the image in the coding. Some people choose to ignore this, as they do not think it will make much of a difference in the overall scheme of things. They would be surprised to learn, then, that including the height and width can actually help the loading process. Because the browser will have the information ahead of time, it will keep a spot for the image open as it loads the rest of the page. This accelerates loading time significantly.