Blog page loading time, one of the most essential feature that can help you in improving your website ranking and increase it's value for readers.
Website loading time is also a factor which is considered by Google, that's the reason why we should work on reducing our blog page loading time.
You had hardly noticed any blog slow-down if you are working on Google Blogger but being a wordpress user you have to worry a little bit.
Bloggers using wordpress usually face downtime on their blog.
So, for helping you guys out, In this article I'll be showing you how can you dramatically reduce your blog page loading time. Here I'll be sharing my personal tips and tricks which if you will follow correctly then you can make a significant change in your loading speed.
But why it is important to reduce loading time ?
Let's have an example. Suppose a website is making $1,00,000 per day, In such case a delay of even 1 second can cost it a loss of $2.5 million/year.
While I was doing research on this topic, I've found that about 47% readers do expect a website should be loaded within 2-3 seconds. If user have to wait for more than 3 seconds for a website then it can make about 40% fall in your blog readers.
You don't want that, right ? So, Carefully start following the best ways which I've listed down which will help you in making your blog speed blazing fast.
1. Removing Unwanted Plugins
Many bloggers select wordpress platform for making their blog. Because of the fact that there are lots of plugins available which reduces your blog efforts and help you in doing things which you can even imagine of.
Unfortunately, Google Blogger doesn't offers these types of plugins.
But somethings this benefit can be a huge drawback for your wordpress blog.
Many newbie bloggers install so many plugins over their blog which gradually results in blog slow down as these plugins consumes lots of server resources.
Now, the next question arrives. How to select wordpress plugins carefully for blogs ?
Here's some tips which you must follow while installing wordpress plugins :-
a. Removing Unwanted Plugins
There are many bloggers who migrates from Google Blogger to Wordpress, because it offers quite large variety of plugins. For this bloggers use "Blogger Importer" Wordpress Plugin. You should make sure to remove that plugin after shifting your blog over wordpress.com.
Except these plugins there are social share plugins, pinterest pin it plugins, etc which slows down your blog.
Always Remember the more plugins you'll be using for your blog, more loading time will be increased.
b. Using Single Plugins Instead of Many
I always recommend using a particular website plugin instead of using a bunch of plugins.
Bloggers use one plugin for sharing their website content, another for creating mobile blog template version and many more. Rather than using various plugins for different purpose, use a single plugin.
Here's Jetpack Plugin for Wordpress which have many amazing features for your wordpress blog management.
In case you are using different plugins for sitemap and SEO, Website Analytics plugin then using yoast plugin will surely be a good idea, as it have all these essential features.
2. Always Use A Better Hosting
Another advantage which you get over self-hosted wordpress blogs is that you can choose your own web hosting services. When it comes on selecting a hosting service for your blog then you would never choose a poor support or crappy service, right ?
If you are having a small wordpress blog then you can select among Hostgator or Bluehost. But in case your blog is quite large then Traffic Planet Hosting will be a good choice.
3. Select A Good Blog Theme
Suppose, You want to build your house, would you prefer using low quality material for construction ? That's surely for No. Same case with your blog too. Think that your blog is your store and internet is where you provide your service by which you make your customers happy.
I would always prefer you not using a free blog template if you are even a bit serious about your blog. Usually free blog templates are poorly coded also they contains lots of unnecessary and malicious codes which can even hack your website.
Here's another fun fact, All paid blog themes are also not good enough. That's the reason why I'm recommending you Genesis Themes From Studiopress. Here you will get a professional blog theme which are well seo optimized and totally secured. Not only these but also makes your blog fast.
4. Optimizing Blog Images
We prefer adding images in our articles through some popular stock photography sites. We all know that images add more value to our articles and increases the visual appearance of our blog. Though using too many images in our blog posts can increase our page loading time.
Therefore, Proper image optimization is needed before uploading/adding images to blog posts.
Here's some of the important tip which you should follow :-
1. You should always decrease the dimensions of your blog images before adding them into your content. Smush it Plugins helps you in decreasing the size of your images without compromising with it's quality.
2. In case you want to upload PNG file to blog post then using TinyPNG tool will surely be a great option for compressing images.
3. You can also prefer using Lazy load wordpress plugin. This plugin will going to help in loading images when user scrolls down the page rather than loading all images together. In this way you get sufficient time to load all the images up there in your article.
Must Visit : SEO Guide For Image Optimization
5. Using Content Delivery Network
Using a CDN i.e, Content Delivery Network helps in distributing the content effectively to all your blog readers. These networks are far better for content delivery all across the globe.
Here's an example which will help you understanding this point more easily :-
Suppose, You are having your dinner but all dishes are in your kitchen. You can only bring one dish at a time then what time will it take to bring all the dishes on your dinning table ?
Other option, You are already having all dishes on your table. You just need to get started with your dinner. Just take the dishes whenever you wish.
So, What's better option ?
Of course, the second one. That option will be lot more easier and time saving compared to going to kitchen every time and bringing dishes one by one.
Well, If you want a Free CDN network then CloudFlare is a good option. In case you want a premium plugin which have more powerful and some extra features then MaxCDN will be an excellent choice.
If you are not yet satisfied with this plugin than Amazon Cloudfront will surely going to be helpful for handling your site load. Handling high traffic can be easily done via this amazing wordpress plugin. Usually large e-commerce websites uses this plugin but in case you are having a blog then MaxCDN will be doing quite good.
6. Minimize Your Codes
There's an Online tool, Pingdom which helps you to analyse your page speed. Not only this but it also shows you which site element takes how much loading time.
Using this amazing tool you can see that which HTML code or java scripts is taking how much time to load. It happens mostly, that you are not in need with particular CSS element in your blog theme, still it's there in your blog template. Removing all those unnecessary elements can help you in increasing your page loading speed.
Being a Wordpress user you can use autoptimize plugin for compressing CSS and other HTML codes.
Don't worry if you are not a wordpress user, A tool named minifier is available for those bloggers who are not working over wordpress platform.
7. Avoid Showing Too Many Blog Posts On Homepage
Many blog themes have an option to limit your blog posts showing on homepage. Displaying 7 or 10 blog post on homepage would be enough. Another thing is, avoiding infinite scrolling in order to increase loading speed of a blog.
8. Avoid Adding JavaScripts At The Top Of Your Blog
Adding JavaScripts such as social flows from Google Plus or Twitter can be a huge factor for increasing page loading time.
Putting JavaScript in the Footer section results in increase of your blog's speed, as it'll get sufficient time to load after your blog content.
9. Avoid Using Too Much Ads
Even I use ads program for monetizing my blog's content. It's a common practice these days.
But you should know that using excessive ad programs can cause in slowing down your blog's speed. Always try to use 2-3 ads banner per page depending on your content length.
Even Google Adsense shows asynchronous ads format which doesn't effect your page speed much.
10. Optimizing Popular Blog Pages
Anyone who's having a blog surely have some popular pages which are viewed more compared to other pages. Using Google Analytics you can track your most popular blog pages and can optimized them properly.
Here are few tips which should be followed for optimizing blog pages :-
1. Limit the ads on that particular page. Instead of showing 5-6 ads, showing 1-2 ads will be sufficient. If you are not making good money from those ads, it's better to remove those ads from that particular blog page.
2. Optimizing images. I've already discussed the technique to optimize blog images.
3. Hiding unwanted sidebar elements.
11. Using a Cache Plugin ( Bonus Tip )
This technique helps you very much in decreasing loading time. I'll personally recommend you to use W3 Total Cache Plugin which significantly reduces page loading time.
Conclusion
That's it with this article. I've almost included all important factors that are responsible to increase loading speed of a blog. If you really want to decrease your page loading time then using a cache plugin, A better hosting network and a good blog template can help you the most.
Hope, you enjoyed reading this detailed article. I want you to leave your feedback, questions or any other kind of suggestion related to this topic down below using the comment section. At last, If you have actually liked this article then kindly share it with your online networks... :)
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