Speed is of the essence now more than ever in web design since visitors want to have a fast site experience, and if you don't meet that requisite, they will go somewhere else. Here you will read some ideas to achieve that goal.

A first step is to make your design minimalistic

Obviously, you begin by having fewer elements to load since it increases the speed of your site. Some minimalistic features are:

• The Hamburger menu instead of a standard navigation bar
• More white space
• The use of short web forms
• Smaller images is also a good idea
• Using just one font on your site

It is also important to understand that it is possible to create the perception of a faster site and if it's perceived to be fast, your users will be happy. Therefore, there's no need to implement complicated technical solutions to improve the response time of a site, just focus on using good design to improve the perception of performance.

Take advantage of what Google offers for developers

Start with Google Developers's own "Make the Web Faster" page, where you will get an assortment of tools to speed up your site design.

Take for instance, the PageSpeed Insights tool, that will give you have access to detailed reports about what's causing your current site to be slow. These insights come for both mobile and desktop versions of your site.

Consider using Lazy Loading

Lazy Loading is a design pattern that's characterized by not rendering objects until the point that they are necessary, meaning when you begin to scroll down the page.

The advantage of this design approach is that your site needs to rely on fewer resources, thereby making it faster in performance.

Optimizing your Server is a Must Have

Your Server response time is how long it takes for your server to respond to a browser request. Implement these strategies to improve your server response:

• Use fewer resources for each page, for instance defer images, combine external CSS files or external Javascript files.
• Use a content delivery network or CDN
• Use a coaching solution
• Improve your web server software configuration