How to Reduce the Loading Time of Your Blog
July 9th, 2010 by Tweet
One thing that every blog owner wants is that his or her blog should have a faster loading time and should load in a split second. And, with Google using site speed in search rankings now, these things have become more vital and important. A fast loading blog is always preferred over the one that takes ages to load. But, how do you optimize your blog so that it has minimum loading time? The following are some great tips and tricks you can use to increase your site speed and decrease the loading time of your blog:
Don’t over use Flash
We agree that flash serves as eye candy; but on the other hand, it is resource hungry and slows your website considerably. So, you should avoid having too much flash content on your blog for fast loading times.
Get a Reliable Web Host
Speaking from my personal experience, having a better web host serves as a major key point if you want your blog to be up and running smoothly. There are many sub-standard web hosts who claim to give best response times but really neither have resources to do so, nor the intentions. So, if you are not on a good host you’ll have very slow loading blog regardless of the fact that you may have optimized it for faster loading.
Optimize your Database
All your blog’s data and images are stored in a database. Whenever one requests a page from your blog, the query is run at the server and the data is fetched from database. In such a situation, it is always recommended to have an optimized and compressed database so that it will be handling all the request queries in minimal possible time. You can use the WP-Optimize plugin to achieve that.
Use Less External Scripts
Overuse of external scripts (like placing a facebook/twitter fan page) slows down the loading speed of your blog considerably. The reason being, all the requests for such external scripts are made from a third party route and you don’t have any control on their speed. If the third party host is slow, your blog will be automatically have higher loading times. Try to minimize external scripts for better loading times.
Install a Caching Plugin
Caching your resources will always have a positive effect on the loading times of your blog. Caching is just saving exact images of pages that are accessed frequently. This saves additional queries to be passed and returned between your blog and the database and thus saving precious loading time. W3 Total cache is your best bet in caching plugin.
Use an HTML Validator
Using an HTML validator can dramatically improve your site’s performance as it helps you to churn out all the errors that may have crept in during designing phase. Use of good validators like W3C HTML Validator is recommended.
Optimize your Images
If there is one thing after flash that eats up the most of your bandwidth, it’s images. Try to minimize the use of images for a super fast loading blog. And wherever possible, try to optimize images. We recommend using Yahoo’s Smush It image optimization tool for best results.
Include a Site Map
Site Map is not only important for the blog’s loading time, but it also helps you blog in getting higher SERP rankings as the search engine bots use a blog’s sitemap to get an idea of the overall structure of the blog. In such a situation, not having a sitemap will result in low search engine rankings which is definitely not a good thing for any blog. Google XMP Sitemap generator is the easiest way for generating a sitemap for your blog. You just have to install and activate it and it will take care of the rest.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed the best and the easiest ways to optimize your blog for best performance and minimum loading times. Do share your views and if you have any more tricks and tip that can further reduce the loading times of one’s blog by dropping down your comments below.
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Rishabh Agarwal is an Engineering student from India. In addition to that, he’s also a passionate Photographer, a Musician and a Web Designer. He writes about technology on his blog, TechyLabs, and Photography on ShutterSkills. Follow him on Twitter: @rish404.
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Great post, thanks for sharing it, as always you helped to have a better blog for the designers…keep it up…
Thanks for all the tips, I’ve used some of them before but there were a few gems that have helped with load up times.
Brilliant advice.
thanks for sharing this article. as to how google looks into websites, we really need to consider the loading time now. faster sites makes everyone happy anyways
Excellent tips, hopefully many bloggers read these and act upon them.
Thanks a million,After adding face book fan page to my home page,i received a warning that my site is extremely slow and will be penalized by some search engines.Removing it did an instant miracle.
Thanks for these tips. Always good to keep them in mind.
I can recommend a very practical tool for optimization
http://siteloadtest.com
Thanks for sharing the tips.