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Fast requires focus. Unfortunately, it’s at the end of the web design journey

You like your web designer. Actually, briefly you loved them. You still remember the day you first laid eyes on that fresh design concept. The first time you saw your ‘name in lights’ on that crisp, responsive home page. They’re nice people and they built you a beautiful website. They listened to your ideas and incorporated the best into your website. They took feedback on the chin and fixed all the bugs before launch and performed warranty items upon request. What is there to be unhappy about?

You have now grown accustomed to the sleek new look and the great user experience. Except that user experience is a bit slow, or so you are hearing from potential customers. You notice it when trying to quickly navigate your site… It just a bit sluggish. You could probably ignore it and hope it all goes away except an acquaintance just got back from a digital marketing travelling roadshow – you know the ones full people who would like to think they are Steve Jobs but tend to come across more like Anthony Robbins. Your acquaintance rattles off words like UX, engagement, metrics, rankings and speed… You stopped listening after ‘speed’ – except you didn’t – that nagging suspicion that your site was slowly captured your attention.

You phone your web designer to have a casual discussion about speed. You are politely told your site is doing OK as it loaded snappily the second time on their fibre connection. Unfortunately, you’re not OK with OK. Surely it is their responsibility to make it fast? The answer, unfortunately, is – not necessarily.

So that makes it your web host’s responsibility, after all, they did mention something about server speed. The answer again is – not necessarily. Read our companion post on Why your website won’t be fast with a traditional web host for why they too drop the speed-ball. 

It turns out what makes websites fast is a mystical fusion of website and web server. Web designers are busy with web designer concerns.

What Web Designers Do

There is much involved in delivering a great website. The scope of web projects is continually growing and typically includes:

• Understanding the client’s organisations objectives
• Researching competitors
• Familiarizing themselves with the brand assets and current usage
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Wireframing the website architecture
• Stock imagery search and curation
• Producing and presenting design concepts
• Front-end web development
• Back-end web development including custom development
• Extracting content and imagery from clients
• Copywriting
• Testing on multiple browsers on multiple devices
• Bug fixes to third-party components and libraries
• Deployment to a live server environment
• DNS & Email configuration
• Training your client how to edit the content in your CMS
• Fixing warranty issues

That’s a lot of territory to cover. Many of those items require university degrees or years of experience to do proficiently. You will notice ‘continually obsessing about your website speed’ is not on that list. 

What Web Designers Won’t Do

Web designers and developers are generally project based. Sure they provide support but it is generally reactive unless you have been very kind and paid them a large ongoing retainer.

Your web designer has done so many great things for you they are a quite tired by the time the website warranty period is finished. Also, the budget was probably exhausted a long time ago and their studio is running on fumes looking to the next project.

A web designer or web developer can only focus on so many things. Speed needs to be someone else’s concern. Fortunately, that is where Hilenium comes in. 

If you would like to understand more read our blog article How Hilenium Hosting Focuses on Fast and Why Your Marketing Manager Can’t Keep Your Website Fast.