If you are browsing the blogs and came across a blog which is loading slowly, trying to do too many things without giving you contents which you want to read. How long have you stayed on that blog?
Page Loading Speed
This is just a measure of how fast your page loads up while somebody is trying to visit the page. Page loading speed is important for SEO as well as for your readers.
It’s a known fact that SEO loves fast loading pages and give higher priority to them. The only reason for that is to offer a better experience for readers (nobody wants to wait in this fast paced web world).
But how can we make sure that our page loading speed is good?
Image: Salvatore Vuono
Last time when I wrote about How to optimize pages with Page Speed tool, I mentioned this can be one of the good tool to check your page loading speed and optimization of the page. Now I want to point out some basic things which helps in loading the page faster.
Image Optimization of Web
Everybody uses image for their blogs, but are you optimizing it for web pages? Image files has some extra data, which is not required for the web pages. We can strip off that data and save some bandwidth or data transfer while the page is loading.
It is really easy to do that, If you have the access to Adobe Photoshop or any other photo editing tool you can do that offline, just save that image in web optimized format. Otherwise there are some nice WordPress Plugins like WP Smush.it which can do the job for you.
The benefit is you save bandwidth and send less data for a page load, which results in faster page loading. The full gain you can calculate by multiplying your unique visitors to reduction size of images and you can simply see that it’s a huge gain.
Image Sizes
Image Sizes are also plays an important part. Big Images will have little bigger size, which requires little more time to download.
But if you try to reduce it by the inbuilt feature from WordPress by just changing the display size then it will need more time. This means that each time a java script has to run to take the file and converts it into display format.
The better way is to use the image with the size which you want to display. So you need to decide what size you want to use for the images and make your images in the same size so you can stop that extra processing for the images.
Loading a big image and reducing the display size does not result in faster page loading, most of the time it increases the loading time.
Stop Running Extra JAVA Script
You can optimize your web page by checking if there is any plugin which is running the java scripts twice. These can be case because every author wants their plugin to be independent and include everything required by them. But because you load multiple plugins there can be some cases where your java script is already loaded and another plugin is loading it again.
A good example is your Facebook like button java script. How many plugin you use to show the like button on the page, are they loading the entire script each time.
I have Commentluv+ enabled on this blog, which supports Facebook like button, but I have another plugin which also provides a Facebook like button.
Commentluv+ has an option where I can stop it for loading the Facebook like scripts (neat feature as I only have to click an option to do this). I have enabled this and now its only loading the script once.
This does not mean that Commentluv+ will not be able to use Facebook like button, once the script is loaded it can be used anywhere in the page. So it still has full functionality but not delaying the loading of page by not loading a duplicate script.
Timing for Java Scripts
This is another important point, if you want to run some java script than try to make sure that its timing is correct. It is really important that it is not stopping your content to be loaded.
Once your content is loaded, you can run the java script. It might not change anything in terms of page loading speed, but will give a feeling of faster load time to your readers as they are able to see the contents.
This might need little technical knowledge as you have to change when you want to run the java scripts, but once you start doing these you will find these things easy.
These are some small tips for faster page loading time and requires active look at the changes on your blogs. What else you use to increase your page loading speed?
When I visit a site and he page is loading so slow, well extremely slow, I usually leave or go to another tab and just go back when the page is loaded already.
Very good blog! Do you have any tips for aspiring writers? I’m hoping to start my own site soon but I’m a little lost on everything. Would you advise starting with a free platform like WordPress or go for a paid option? There are so many options out there that I’m completely confused .. Any tips? Thank you!
I always prefer paid option because of the two reasons.
1. Once you invest something you will feel more pressure to make it work and you will give more efforts. It is easy to dump free blogs as there is nothing to loose.
2. I like to have full control on my site and with WordPress and so many available plugins, self-hosted sites is the way go forward for me. (hosting is really cheap these days, you can start with shared hosting).
Thanks Sanjeev for sharing eellent idea and you might have been using the tips as you have mentioned above as your blog is downloading very fast.
Thanks Lalit, Yes I am trying to implement the suggestions, currently scoring somewhere between 85-90 in pagespeed tool and trying to get it past 90. Still few more things to be done.
I go through my blog once in a while and review everything that loads with each page. If I find that I really don’t need something, I remove it.
I use Incapsula as a CDN-like option, and it has helped my blog load quickly and keeps it secure.
It is really easy to collect lot of unusable things with the time, revisiting those and making sure it is really required is a great way to make sure page load speed is good.
Hey Sanjeev these are all great ideas! I think one the best things I did for blog engage blog was removed all the extras I had on there. There was one point where I had tons of plugins but I think every new blogger falls into the pit hole. We get excited, start adding things we think are cool but little do we know it’s affecting the performance of our software and visiting experience from our readers.
I agree Brian, I have also removed lot of useless plugins which does not add anything to the blog. It’s really easy for new people to fall in trap and install many plugins and they end up slowing the blog.
You should add “Using a CDN” to your list. There are several free ones out there, but I use one called cloudflare that is the easiest to setup and seems to work well.
I also second what you say about eliminating unnecessary JS files. Multiple plugins will load twitter, facebook, etc scripts and sometimes different scripts that do the same thing. It’s good to look at your page source and find any duplicates and make the changes needed to fix the problem right.
I have just moved this blog to CDN 3 days ago. I have also opted for Cloudflare looks a great service, it was easy to setup at-least. Now lets see how it comes out in terms of speed.
Also, there’s a lot of good caching plugins available for the wordpress blog. Another option may be to look into a CDN which will cache your content on their servers and serve up your pages faster.
Yes these two are the additional and effective methods, I was planning to cover those in my next post. Thanks for bringing them up here.
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