Page load speed, website bells and whistles, and more
Click around this site a little. Go to the homepage, choose an article, go back, choose another. Notice anything? My hope is that you'll notice this site loads very quickly.
I wrote the html and css for this simple website template by hand. Every line. That's not me bragging about being a great dev (as I am not!); I mention it to point out that this site isn't bogged down with bloated frameworks or javascript libraries, unused functions, large image files, etc.
This site's code is about as minimalist as you can get for a project of this size. Take a look under the hood of this site if you feel so inclined; you may be surprised at how little code there is. (Just don't judge me too harshly, as I haven't been a hands-on dev in many years!) There's no framework, no CMS, and no javascript.
Why?
To achieve the fastest page load speed possible.
Google crawls webpages and measures their load speed. People don't talk about this enough! Google rewards fast-loading sites by ranking them higher in search results, and they punish slow-loading sites by ranking them lower. Tons of our colleagues and clients aren't even aware of this, and it's hurting the work that we do.
If your site and another site are both equally relevant for a certain search topic, the faster-loading site will be ranked higher.
A very slow-loading site will be listed much lower, or not at all.
For this reason it's important to avoid designing elements that add a lot of file weight to the total weight of the page. Things that incur a large amount of file weight include: huge hero images, embedded brand fonts (Google fonts are better!), carousels with multiple large images, parallax and/or "scrollytelling" effects with tons of images and animation, high-res images for infographics and photos, images that haven't been resized/optimized/compressed for the web, png sequence (flip book) animations, animated gifs, bloated code libraries, etc etc etc!
Simple, streamlined design is better for users and better for SEO. Remember: focus on success!
Bells and whistles
For whatever it's worth, I'm famously anti-javascript (with many, many caveats!). I firmly believe that most uses of javascript — in a site that's mainly about sharing information, rather than providing robust functionality — are not good for users, for the following reasons:
- They don't offer any benefit to the user for finding/consuming content.
- They are likely to put steps (taps/clicks, and time) between the user and the content they're looking for, thus slowing down the experience of using the site, and leading to bounces.
- They simply do not facilitate a good user experience.
- Just the presence of bloated javascript libraries can slow a site down.
We're talking carousels, popups/overlays, accordions, tabbed areas, scrollytelling, lazy loading content, etc — all the tricks that designers and devs love to use to present information in a way that they feel is cool. Clients tend to love these features, but they don't realize that these features may be hurting the experience of their site. We need to educate them about this!
Again, I'm mainly talking about sites like this one, the main point of which is sharing information. The same would be true of any "brochure"-type site. I'm not talking about sites that must offer robust functionality for things like commerce, finance, social media, etc. Those kinds of sites need lots of javascript to create satisfying experiences!
But coming back to brochure sites and other informational sites: for these types of sites, most uses of javascript are bells and whistles that may please creatives and clients (because they're cool) as well as developers (because they're fun to build). They're not ideal for the user. And every single thing we put into the creation of a website should be for the benefit of the user — giving them an easier, faster, more satisfying experience. (As always, my mantra is: focus on success.) Users won't return to your site because it had cool moving parts. They will return to your site because they were able to engage with the content they wanted quickly and seamlessly.
This site contains no javascript. Zero. And the reason for that is that javascript cannot make this site any more effective at doing its job: delivering content to users.
Am I saying every informational site should be as minimalist as this one? You're probably not going to like my answer — which is yes. However, being realistic, it's important to acknowledge that we're always going to have reasons to create sites that are more graphical, more robust, with more moving parts. I encourage you to be cautious about where you use bells and whistles, and above all make sure you're not hurting your website's user experience — or wasting your client's money.
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.