This is a guest post by Karan who blogs at Techfudge. If you like to write for Shoutmeloud, do read: Shoutmeloud revenue sharing program.
Few days back we informed you about Google started ranking website based on Speed and since that time everyone is trying to optimize their blog for speed. Decreasing load time helps search engine and also your readers. Fast loading of your blog will also help in reducing the bounce rate.
Reduce your site's loading time
Here we introduce 7 new and innovative ways to accomplish the same.
Avoid using Lots of WordPress plugins
Plugins have a great share in contributing to your site’s loading time and you will be pleased to know that most plugins can be substituted with direct codes.
So minimizing the use of plugins will be a great help in reducing the loading time. Make sure you are using any caching plugin like Super cache.
- How many WordPress plugin we should use
- Remove WordPress plugin to Fix WordPress Internal server error message
Optimize your images
It’s good to make your posts illustrative by integrating relevant images, but too much of anything ain’t good.Therefore, you musn’t puit more than 3-4 images per page.
Moreover,resize and crop your images in order to reduce size and save them for web as .PNG or .GIF,avoiding JPG images will help. Here are 2 resources which will help you to compress you image:
Avoid displaying flash on your blog
Flash content significantly increases the loadtime of your blog. Avoiding flash and related plugins can add to efficiency of your site. Flash are also known as bad for SEO.
Choose your theme wisely
Choose a clean and simple theme for your blog. Many people like me prefer thesis due to its simple layout and great SEO resources. Moreover, being simple to customize it is a great choice.
But whichever theme you use, make sure that it has got the sidebar to the right and it should load after your content. Check Thesis 1.7 which is optimized WordPress theme for speed and SEO.
Add slashes to urls
Inlcuding a slash(/) at the end of your urls will make the server conclude that it is a directory page and will reduce the loading time of the site.
Eg.
Karnlabs.com/privacy-policy/ is well optimized rather than Karnlabs.com/privacy-policy
Host your images on your own server
Hosting your images on your own server rather than third-party sites is a nice idea as local files are always loaded faster than external file. It will save you a lot of time in DNS lookup. If you want to optimize more, have your images install in sub domain.
Avoid too many advertisements
Don’t display too many ads on your blog. Many PPC ads are full of unnecessary html content and can affect your site’s loading time by a great margin. If advertisements are a must, I advice to go with Google Adsense as it is well optimized and gives the best CPC.
These are few simple steps which I can suggest to optimize your blog load time. Do let me know more tricks which can help us to optimize blog for speed?
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{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
nice tips specially I believe lots of ads slowing most of the blogs
Hey karen,
Nice Post dude. Those are some great ways.
Thanks for sharing this great Post. Retweeted.
~Dev
Great Tips Karen on how to reduce loading times!
Regarding images, I always use Irfanview, as it’s free and effective.
Kindest,
Nabeel
Lolz, dude its karan!..
Great Tips Karen on how to reduce loading times!
Regarding images, I always use Irfanview to resize images, as it’s free and effective.
Kindest,
Nabeel
Sorry for interupting dude..but its Karan and not Karen..
And ya thanks for commenting..
Oh Sorry about that Karan.
I was looking at Dev’s comment and saw he wrote Karen, so I got confused and wrote Karen too.
Sorry again man.
Nabeel
Most of user always jump with in min because loading time of website is very high.Thanks for making aware .Now I will apply.
Hey very nice tips
Thnx!
Can u tell me how to install images in sub domain and call them on our site ?
And How it will save loading time?
Nice tips for newbies, I would recommend you to Proofread ur article before posting, some spell errors are there, try to avoid them next time
Worthy tips
thanks
Thanks karan.Nice article.good tips for speeding up blog.
few i can apply to my blog.
Thanks for the tips. Recently my blog was brought down my host service guys. Found out that it was due to some plugins taking up lots of cpu time.
Thanks for the tips… i never knew about #5 with the trailing slashes… will have to try it out, as i never use them
Good its helped me a lot , i got the importance of /
Some people might think loading time of a blog is not important.. but if your blog posts are too heavy with a lot of pics, graphics etc then all your posts will not be shown in the home page.. i had that problem and i ended up taking out a lot of pics and stuff just to reduce the loading time and to show all the posts on the home page
Thank you all for you comments.!
that rocks! I was looking for a guide like this to help me increase the speed on my wordpress blog
And Do not forget to test your site against Google Page Speed. It can help you a lot to optimize your site.
I never know that the “Add slashes to urls” tip will actually have a speed improvement somewhat.. I’ve been using a …./post-name.html so far and don’t really want to change my permalinks