When you have a website there are many things to make decisions on, one of them is if you should consider having a loading icon on your website. A loading icon for those uninformed, is something that shows to the website visitor before they see the complete website. A loading icon could be default on a theme, plugin, or just come default with your website platform (WordPress is just one of the most popular platforms) to choose from and it doesn’t come with a loading icon by default).

The answer to the question (should you use a loading icon on your website) is no. A loading icon simply makes people wait for your website to show, it shows that you (or whoever maintains your website) put too much on the website, and it shows you have no respect to your website visitors by not giving them any sort of indication how long it’s going to take for your website to load. What should you do instead of a loading icon? There are numerous things you can do:

What should you do instead of a loading icon? There are numerous things you can do:

• setup lazy loading (wait until the website visitor is that at point on the website to load that area). If you are using WordPress then Torque has a guide for you. If you are using Magento there are many extensions to get lazy loading working. If you are using Shopify you can either add lazy loading yourself or you can find a theme that has lazy loading which templatemonster has many.
• have a loading icon that has a sign of progress (if you show progress then visitors are more likely to wait).
• explain why the visitor is waiting (if you explain that images are loading, or the site is putting everything together then people are most likely to wait patiently).
• make your website load faster (because people don’t want to wait around for your website to load). If you are using Wix there is a guide to loading time at support.wix.com. If you are using Squarespace then read the guide at support.squarespace.com. If you are using Godaddy Website builder they provide a way to view file size and loading information on their help page. If you are on Drupal then befused provides 19 simple methods to improve the speed of your website at https://befused.com/drupal/performance-improve. If you are using Joomla then there is a huge guide to get your website to load quickly at CollectiveRay.

If you have a loading icon and want to get rid of it you should be able to, look in the settings to find a way to turn it off. The loading icon most likely came default with your theme so you should be able to google your theme name and turn off loading icon, and find a guide on how to turn it off. If you can’t turn it off then I suggest you find a different theme.

I hope you found this helpful, and that you turned off the loading icon on your website.