Your candidates are in a hurry, people do not wait around for a slow website or battle with a website that is difficult to use. It is vitally important that your recruitment website loads quickly and is easy to navigate.
We not only create new websites for recruiters, we ‘inherit’ websites built by others where we may be required to add new functionality or content, give it a design refresh or fix broken areas. The majority of the websites we inherit, are not the fastest and are in need of a speed boost.
Here are the top things we do to speed up a website;
Fix broken code
This is the only item on this list that 100% requires a developer. More often than not the code behind a website generates lots of errors (that you can’t see) that will slow the website down, as your web browser tries it’s best to deliver the website despite the errors.
Fix these errors, speed up the website, a no brainer.
Website Caching
Each time a website is displayed, the web server has to contact the database and build up the page for the visitor. Instead of doing this each time, website caching will create a pre-made version of the web page and give this to each user instead. This ‘here’s one I made earlier’ approach is significantly faster that having to build the page every visit.
Configure Website Caching
Recruitment websites commonly feature a dynamic job list, saving a copy of your job page will mean that you latest jobs won’t display on the website once they are available.
Luckily, most website caching systems provide a configuration area. Any page with jobs on it, exclude from the cache. This means the website loads quickly, whilst also displaying your jobs in real time.
You can also set the re-cache period. If you want to enable job page caching but keep your jobs up to date, have the cache recreate every hour.
Deliver the correct size images
It’s crazy the amount of times we see websites load a huge image, then display just a tiny version on the website. If the image on your website is 250px x 250px, deliver an image that size. There is no point loading an image 2500px x 2500px and shrinking it down.
To achieve this, often the CMS has an image settings section that tells it to create various sizes of the same image. In WordPress, this is found in Settings > Media.
Defer Loading
Most websites load everything before the site is displayed. This means you are loading items the user might not see, such as images further down the page, or a footer for example.
By only loading what is immediately visible and another page height below (so that if the user does scroll, they do not have to wait for the area immediately below to load), the website is delivered much faster, and also saves you bandwidth cost.
Combine Files
The number of files behind a website quicky adds up. You add a few plugins and before you know it, the website is loading another few thousand files.
Many web servers have tools that will combine files, so instead of the server having to grab lots of individual files, it will combine these files into a larger file meaning only one file has to be downloaded. This is much faster in terms of performance.
This technique doesn’t work for every website as it depends on how the files have been written, but when it works, it works great.
Minify Files
To make code easier to read, developers will format their code in certain ways. This formatting adds to the file size, slowing down your load times.
Again using server tools, you can ask the server to remove the formatting of these files, making their file size smaller and faster to load.
Make sure the website is easy to use
Making sure the website loads fast using the techniques above won’t help the visitor if they can’t navigate around the website easily.
Utilise clear navigation, allow logical progression through the website and employ Call to Action areas to highlight popular links easily.
I was going to conclude by writing ‘This wraps up our top tips on making your recruitment website faster’ but that sounds like what an AI tool would write. All of our posts are human written by either our designers and developers, as a result, the English may not be the best but each and every post contains real life info, from real life people.
Are you a recruiter with a website in need of speeding up? If so, get in contact with us for a no obligation quote.
If you are not a recruiter but found this page via search engine, our main brand squarechilli (website design and development) are ready to take care of you.