There's no doubt animated content looks great on a website. Fresh, flowing visuals capture visitors' attention and draw them in to explore further. However, failing to optimize animations hurts conversions and user experience. Not to mention, slow websites use more energy, increasing the carbon output of your brand.
SpeedSense recently reviewed SRAM's new animated landing page to see how videos, GIFs, and animations impact site speed and carbon outputs. Read on to find our top five website content optimization takeaways from this review, plus learn how you can improve your website conversions, along with your carbon footprint.
Top 5 Takeaways from SRAM's New Landing Page
1. Animated content has a significant impact on website performance.
Animations and videos on websites can cause pages to run slower, leading to longer loading times, negatively affecting user experience and ultimately reducing conversions. This is especially true if the animation is overly complex or uses high-resolution graphics.
Learn how replacing GIFs with video content can improve page load times.
2. Large page sizes can be damaging
The landing page for SRAM’s new product is massive, reaching up to 200 megabytes of data. This size can significantly affect bounce rates, eat away at your visitors’ expensive data plans, and increase CO2 emissions with every extra byte transmitted, making it essential to optimize this page size as much as possible.
3. GIFs are a major contributor to page size
GIFs can be very useful for animations, however, they come with large file sizes that limit the amount of content you can put on one page. Replacing these GIFs with video formats such as MP4 or WebM can significantly reduce page size, resulting in faster loading times and better user experience.
4. Resizing images helps performance
High-resolution images can be great for visuals, but they also take up a lot of space. Responsively resizing and optimizing assets can further improve performance and user experience across various devices.
5. Lazy loading content reduces page load times
Lazy loading is a technique where assets aren’t loaded until they’re almost visible on screen. This can be applied to any below-the-fold content such as images, videos and other media so that they are not loaded until needed.
Implementing lazy loading can significantly reduce initial page load times and improve overall performance. It can also reduce unnecessary network requests and data consumption on mobile devices. Why degrade the UX by loading parts of the page that may never be seen?
How Slow Sites Impact the Planet
While slow-loading sites are a major inconvenience for users, they can also harm the environment. It takes energy to send data around the planet over the internet, and that energy produces carbon dioxide emissions. By reducing webpage payloads, and optimizing the assets on your site, you can help reduce CO2 emissions and your company’s carbon footprint.
Better Online Experiences: For All Users and Earth
SRAM's site offers an engaging user experience, and it's possible to get the same results without impacting page load times.
When displaying animations on a website, be sure to:
- optimize photo and video assets to reduce page size,
- replace GIFs with more efficient video formats, and
- adopt lazy loading techniques to reduce load time.
If you need assistance optimizing your website, don't hesitate to reach out for help. Let's work together to create a better online experience for users and a greener future for our planet.
