Load Fewer Resources While Web Designing For Better Image Delivery

by Andrew Bagel-Brown Business and Marketing

design for websites

You may have done everything to optimize your website but you will not get the results until and unless your website is high in performance. The load time, the quality of content and images, the information and message conveyed all will add to its performance.

Web designing today have a different concept wherein the minimalist approach is followed. This is the approach in which the number of elements in the content of the website is fewer. This ‘less is more’ principle followed in modern web designing ensures that it has all the necessary info and elements that will tell about:

The business
The message
The product and
The offers.

Apart from the minimum number of images and elements used in the site you can also follow a few other specific techniques using CSS such as creating:

Gradients
Buttons and
Other advanced elements.

Loading fewer resources not only increases the speed of the site but also gives it a more meaningful appeal when it looks uncluttered. This will positively impact the user experience.

Lazy loading process

Another important technique that you can follow in your web designing process like a professional New York web design agency does is the lazy loading technique for your images. Lazy loading actually means deferring loading of the elements that are not required instantaneously.

For example, the images are loaded at a later point of time such as when the image is about to enter or enters the viewport. It is then that the users can see the image on the viewport or on the screen. In this lazy loading process:

The images and elements will not load in the beginning
There will be just the image placeholders
The images will be loaded in these placeholders later asynchronously.

There is no particular sequence maintained for these images and other elements to get loaded. The benefit of the lazy loading process is that the users can start reading the text immediately as that is the most important thing of any website which loads instantly while the other things get loaded in due time.

A theoretical example

If you are not much familiar with the lazy loading process, a theoretical example will help you to understand in a much better way. Assume that you need to design a web page that has about one hundred products and its images and info to load.

If you request all these hundred images of your product at the same time tight at the very beginning, it will obviously slow down your website load time. This is because the images will have to compete against each other for:

The network bandwidth
The CPU resources
CSS
JS and with other crucial items on the page.

When you use the lazy loading process, this time taking competition is reduced significantly as there may be about 30 images that will load at a time and will be visible to the user on their feeds initially.

As and when the user starts to move or scroll down the web page, more images will continue to load.

This will not only help in improving the initial load time but will also ensure far better user experience.

On the other hand, assume that the users do not scroll down the entire page. In such cases, there will be a few pages that will not get loaded at all. This type of image delivery will help you to save a lot on the bandwidth costs for making a delivery.

Getting started

If you want to use lazy loading most proficiently, it is quite simple to start with. There are lots of tools that will help you in the process as such. These tools include:

The JS libraries such as jQuery Lazy

The latest IntersectionObserver API and others.

Some of these tools are more performing and result-driven than the most commonly used JS libraries for lazy loading.

Use a good CDN

Once you have ensured the type of elements and images to include in your website, you must focus on the time factor and the storage space it will take up. It goes without saying that you will need to make your web pages, especially those that have lots of images on it load quickly. If only you can decrease the image load time you will be able to reduce the overall load time of the web pages that will in turn result into:

Providing a better user experience
Gain a higher rank on the search engines
Gaining more organic traffic
Get a higher chance of conversion and
Increase your sales volume and business revenue.

For this, you will need to use one of the best Content Delivery Networks or CDNs. These are ideally a set of proxy servers that have a globally distributed caching.

How a CDN works

The best way to explain or to know how a CDN works are through an example. Suppose your website server is situated in USA. The content delivery network will cache your images, graphics and other elements of the website through its globally distributed network of servers. Well, it is much more complex than that.

For the sake of simplicity, assume that one of your users is from Brazil and requests for an image from your website. This image is delivered to your Brazilian user not from the server in USA but from the closest node to the user using the right CDN. This will reduce the round trip and load time required to deliver the image from USA to Brazil!

There are a lot of reliable and notable CDNs you will come across but when you choose one for your need make sure that it supports HTTP/2.

This is a new protocol for transporting content on the web.
This helps in expediting the loading time significantly.
This uses techniques such as header compression, multiplexing, and server push.

All these reduce the page load time and ensure better content delivery without much effort as HTTP/2 protocol is supported by the CDNs to do a good job in explaining the performance visually as well as the difference between the older HTTP/1 and the new HTTP/2 protocol.