You may have noticed how simple this page is. This is something we have done deliberately.
The visual beauty of a webpage is important, but this page is starkly plain to illustrate a point. In fact there is not a single image on this page, which has the effect of making the page load FAST.
A few years ago we took one of our client's sites lite, for sake of speed. We took the drastic step of culling 95% of all the photos, and removing nearly all the javascript, the home page slider and much more. The effect afterwards was dramatic. The bounce rate dropped overnight to around 40% and the amount of retained traffic doubled.
The process to take a site lite isn't as complex as the normal design process. Rather the focus is on simplicity, clean pages, and making sure the wording and copy is correct. We seek to have every page on your website load around the 1 second mark or quicker. This is four times faster than most good sites. We have a series of steps we work through to obtain this goal, including both improved code and improved hosting pratices.