Business website development in Africa: build for speed on weak connections

A website that looks good on a fast office connection can be unusable on a phone with weak mobile data. In many African markets, many visitors arrive on exactly that kind of connection, so speed is not a detail. It decides whether people stay, buy or leave.

Why speed matters for your business

Visitors leave slow pages. Search engines also take speed and mobile quality into account when they rank pages. A fast website therefore brings more visitors and keeps more of them.

Seven practical techniques

• Pre-render your pages. Send finished HTML instead of an empty page that needs a lot of JavaScript to appear. The text shows at once and search engines read it without effort.
• Keep the code small. Ship only what each page needs and load the rest later.
• Use light images. Modern formats such as WebP, the right dimensions and lazy loading save a lot of data.
• Limit fonts and heavy media. Use few font files and never autoplay large videos on mobile.
• Cache aggressively. Files that never change should be kept by the browser for a long time.
• Place servers close to users. Distance adds delay. A content delivery network and a nearby region for your server and database reduce it.
• Do slow work in the background. Do not make the visitor wait for emails or third-party services: answer first, process after.

Design for phones first

Many visitors use a phone. Make buttons easy to tap, text easy to read and forms short. Test on a modest phone and a throttled connection, not only on your own laptop.

Be found by search engines

• Give each page its own title and description.
• Publish in French and English with the right language tags so each visitor sees the right version.
• Add structured data that states your company, services and articles.
• Publish useful articles on the questions your customers ask.
• Use one address for each page and redirect the others to it.

Built to be owned and maintained

A website needs updates and monitoring after launch. We build marketing websites, web apps and dashboards for businesses in Africa and France, deploy them in the cloud, and can keep them running with a maintenance contract. See our web and IT services or contact us to discuss your project.