Tips to Speed up your Blog
“People hate waiting”. If your website is not loading within 4-5 seconds, you are likely to lose a lot of visitors. Normally we assume that people are seeing our blog at the same speed as we are. It is hard to pinpoint the exact culprit that is slowing down your web page. As there are many different elements like CSS, JavaScript, Images, Flash, Frames etc. which take time in loading.
There are a number of surfers who have modems less than 56K. Everyone does not have Cable Modem, ISDN or T1 connection to the internet. Hence, it is very important for a web designer to see that his/her sites load as fast as possible.
When you view your web page, your content loads in a specific order. Images and Media are the main bandwidth hogs and take a lot of time in loading. I would suggest you to remove all forms of multimedia embedded in your front page of website except for images. You can put a background song on your web page, but normally these sound files capture a lot of bandwidth, especially if it is a .wav file. Video files should be avoided unless there is a need and keep the file sizes small. But still try and use such files in other pages of your website because as I said “People hate waiting”.
Now the next big thing that worries a lot is the images. You have to be very careful while dealing with images. Use smaller dimensions for images to reduce the file size and for this you can use the image editing programs which helps in resizing the images. You can also take help of some of the special services available on web and with these you can compress your images. This also helps you in choosing the image that can still look good after you have compressed them. If the size of image that you have used is 500 pixels x 500 pixels, people will keep waiting and page might take forever to load.
Once you have the image as compact as you want, you can use that image in other pages of your website and you can save time in loading. The image will be in the browser’s cache which you loaded on the front page for the surfer and it will load instantly when called on the other pages. With this, you will be able to load other things without worrying for the image.
There is one more thing that you can do, just define the width and height of the image in your entire image tags. Your time will be saved in adjusting many things once the image starts loading and your page will not jump when an image loads.
You can also use thumbnails which further link to full size images in new window and for videos; you can use a video hosting service like You Tube or VideoEgg etc. to upload the file and this displays a player in your posts.
Reducing the amount of content displayed on the front page will reduce the load time of your website. The extended post element allows you to display an introduction on your main page and the remainder of the post on post’s permalink page e.g. a link to “read more” will be displayed at the end of the post.
These were some of the tricks that you can use if your website or blog loads slowly. I am sure you will definitely save some extra time and there is a possibility that it may reduce clutter a little bit.
DSL Speed helps~~
Sounds smart. Definetely people hates to wait and not every body has a good Internet connection.
In my case a need to show media files(at least that´s what I think) in my first page but after your tips I will reconsider it. Perhaps making a photo capture of the media files and putting the jpg file in the site with a link to the media file will be the solution … thank you for your tips!!
You can check using online tools how fast your site is loading, for example – by http://Site-Perf.com/
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Really a OH BLOG
whatever tips one needs to work and benefit from blogging, u guys have it.
Keep them coming. I donno whether you can get exhausted with the tips r not.
Hi guys n Gals Just like the good information on this blogohblog thread
…. I came across a good tool box of cool SEO resources of web master tools some time ago on line but you no what I kept losing them in all the jumble of my computers filing system … I had to keep searching around and found them again after up-grading my computer … Soooo then decided I would put them on my website so I could easily find them when ever I needed to check for speed or even keywords so here you go you can have the use of these must have tools to so you don’t have to bother searching around…. Cool of what?
All my best to you and yours
phillip Skinner
Jai thanks for your information, actually I have some websites in spanish but my mains web are http://www.HagaNegocios.com and http://www.Alokate.com I have this concerns:
1. In your online book Wordpress SEO you speak about a plugin that avoid delays with ping services. The problem is that the link don’t open do you have other option?.
2. I have submitted my websites to a ping services in spanish that request me that I add a link with his logo in my website. Could it affect the speed of my website?
Thanks