Make Your Blog Load Faster
A slow-loading blog will quickly annoy the average blog surfer, who often has the attention span of a gnat. Fortunately, there are several simple tricks you can use to speed the process up and get that blog loading with a quickness. And before you ask why this matters, let me tell you: A slow loading blog = An unread blog. You put all your hard work and time into creating the perfect blog post, and you want your hard work to be admired and read by an audience that extends beyond your mom and her best friend, right? Of course you do. But, if your blog loads like molasses, ain't nobody gonna get to admire your hard work, as they'll be clicking the back button pretty quickly. Sounds depressing, right? No worries; use these tips to speed your blog loading up and you'll have a fanclub in no time!
More Blogging Tips!
Easy on the number of posts per page.
Do you have your last 30 posts showing? If so, that's way too many! You want to have a handful up for people to see, and that's it. Anything more and you're simply adding unnecessary wait time to your loading process. Limit your shown posts to something under 10; if people want to read more than that, they can click!
Easy on the auto-load videos.
Some blogs have music videos or other types of video clips that start playing when the blog is loaded. These videos may be super cool, but no one is going to get to appreciate them if the back out of your blog before they finish loading. Instead of having them load automatically, have the player available for people to click on if they should want to.
Easy on the images.
The more images you have sitting on your blog, the longer it will take someone's computer to load the whole thing up. And while it may only take 40 seconds, this is a freakin' eternity in blogland. No one is going to sit there and wait for some photo of your latest celebricrush to load that long! You'll either want to significantly reduce the image size, or host it on a site like Picasa and link to it from the sidebar.
Easy on the scripts/widgets.
Unless the scripts are official scripts created by your blog host, a lot of those cool little widgets people put on their blogs take a lot of time to load up. How fast it loads depends on the site where it's actually hosted -- and no, that doesn't mean your site. Whoever created the script is hosting it, and if their site is slow, it will only add time to your own page loading, as your blog will need to wait for their site before it can finish loading properly.
