Your blog’s design is affecting its performance

Your blog’s design is affecting its performance — on at least a couple fronts.

One is speed. The longer it takes your blog to load, the more likely users will leave. Two is ease of use for readers.

Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt), co-founder of WordPress, shared word today of a post from web designer, Brad Frost (@brad_frost), on performance as design.

Rather than looking at site performance as a technology issue, Frost says it’s often a design issue. Graphic laden sites are tremendously obese and backfire on the site owner.

While these sites may be visually arresting (though for a lot of them that’s certainly debatable), a good many visitors will never stick around to see them. 74% of mobile web users will leave a site if it takes longer than 5 seconds to load. That means you have 5 seconds of someone’s time to get them what they want, or they’re gone.

We’ll often have clients requesting multi-layer heavy graphic design. They often request features they’ve seen elsewhere or just dreamed up. Not only are the features unneeded, but they detract from the user’s experience and slow the blog down.

In addition to speed, blogs are meant to be read, one post at a time. Features and graphics can detract from a pleasant reading experience.

This is especially true on mobile and in browsers on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Try reading a blog with lots of graphics and features on Flipboard – ugh.

As a a blog publisher you need mobile users – bad. They represent upwards of 35% of your readers.

Mobile users also tend to be more social. If your blog does not load fast on mobile with a clean user interface for ease of reading, you’ll lose mobile users who would have otherwise shared your posts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Light and clean design can still be customized for your brand. Look at Dashboard Insights by Foley and Lardner as an example.

Less is more here. Simple and eloquent design with a focus on ease of use for readers.