Performance driven web design
Updated on Jun 07, 2020
This week I wrote an article on the iWeb blog about performance driven web design. This is a more in-depth of an article I wrote a few weeks ago on this blog called Speed is design. In the article I go into depth about why companies should care about speed and how there are multiple reasons for a poorly performing website that crosses multiple disciplines.
Spoiler alert: Team work is vital.
A fast website requires a team effort where performance is put at the forefront of all decisions. Every feature or designed element has a cost to performance. It’s a balancing act between features, design and performance. As a team, we need to weigh up the pros and cons of each element and decide whether it’s inclusion outweighs the cost to performance.
A good example is carousels. Carousels have a huge cost to performance. They are large to download (with multiple images and JavaScript) and can take a lot of processing power to animate. The cost of a carousel is high but the impact is very low. Studies have shown that only 1% of users click the featured banner with 90% of those clicks being the first image. That means that the other banners are only clicked 0.1% of the time.
