Your website is one place where the size definitely matters! The most important time to think about the size of everything on your page is when you are first designing it or redesigning it. Don’t panic if you already have a website set up, there is never a wrong time to redesign your page if isn’t working right. So what size on a website matters? Well, several sizes actually.
The Size of Your Website
This is hands down the most important thing relating to size on your website. The size of your website affects the loading time of your home page, which ultimately affects if a person stays on your site or not. So basically, if you make someone wait too long for your page to load, you have already lost them. According to Google engineers in 2012, if your page takes 250 milliseconds or longer to load than your competitor, people will visit your page less. You can literally lose your customers in the blink of an eye if you are not careful. Test your page and make sure that all your cool web effects don’t slow down the load time of your page.
The Size of Your Browser Display
It may be hard sometimes to avoid tunnel vision when designing your website, but you really have to look at the whole picture, or in this case your whole website. Think of how your website will look when the browser is different sizes, and how your page will appear. Do you want the middle to stay fixed on the page and the sides get smaller, or do you want the website to stay fixed in the upper left hand corner and other elements get smaller? These are things you have to think about when designing your page, because everyone will be viewing it on different screen sizes. Also, it is wise to keep mobile in mind as well. If your fully functional website doesn’t look good on mobile devices, then maybe you need to have a separate mobile website.
The Size of Your Page Elements
You probably already know that these play a factor in your website, but do you know how big of a factor that they play? Thanks to Google Analytics you can! Inside Google, there is In-Page Analytics that let you view how many people clicked on different things on your website. This can help tremendously when it comes to redesigning your site and what you wish to feature. Things that can be easily adjusted to make a huge difference are the size of your: company name, navigation bar, text and images.
The Size of “The Square”
It is a widely known fact that you have 8 seconds to grab a prospective customer’s attention before they lose interest (this time starts after the page has fully loaded). You’re probably wondering what this has to do with a square, and the answer is everything! The first thing people see when they look at your page is what will grab their attention or not. This place just so happens to be in the middle to upper right side of the top of the page. Think of this sweet spot as the “heart” of your page. You want all of the important information to be displayed here in a neat, organized, and creative way in order for this to work in your favor. It is often hard to do this to your own website, so test it out first on other company websites to see how they utilize this prime web real estate space.