Improve Load Time of Your Blog
Importance of load time
In very simple terms load time is the amount of time taken by your website or blog to fully load in the browser. Although the time can vary depending on the connection you still have to be mindful of visitors with low bandwidth internet connections. Load time plays a very important part in the success of your blog and you can ill afford to ignore it. There are many thing you can do to improve the load time of your blog , some of them require very little effort and can drastically increase the load time of your blog. Below are few of them that you can try out.
Simple steps to improve load time
Removing Unnecessary Database Calls
If you are using a free WordPress theme or any theme that is designed for public use then you will find that some data base calls are made to get the necessary data. But if you are familiar with HTML or PHP then you can remove this unnecessary data base calls and hard code the values which will reduce the load time. Thing to remember is that these things want dramatically change load time but collectively they will have an impact on your blogs load time.
Optimizing Images
Definitely one of the biggest headaches for blogs , because of there high file size images usually take a while to load, so if you are using images in your blog you should optimize them as best as you can. You should be careful of the type of images you upload as well, although Bitmap type images gives you the best quality there large file size greatly reduces load time, so JPEG and PNG formats are the best to use in your blog. Other than that you can use free image optimizing software available in the internet. Plenty of them come up with a Google Search and they all have there advantages and disadvantages. Pick the one that best suits your needs.
Using Plug-ins
If you are using self hosted WordPress then you must have added plug-ins to improve functionality. Problem is plug-ins tend to slow down the loading of your blog so make sure you are using only the most necessary plug-ins in your blog. Also if you are adding a new plug-in make sure to check the load times before and after adding the plug-ins. Also there are plug-ins that are specifically there to improve the load time of your blog , one great example of such a plug-in is WP-Super cache.
Changing Hosts and Moving to a Dedicated Server
This is kind of a last resort thing , but if simple optimization strategies don't work this might be the best solution. If you have a small blog with relatively low traffic then shared hosting is good enough for you but as your readership and popularity grows you might want to switch to a dedicated server.
Getting Rid of Ads
If you are looking to make money from blogging as I do , then you have to find a way to monetize your blog. But you have to find the right balance between monetizing and user experience. There no clear cut definition of how to do this because it changes according to your blog. But cluttering your blog with ads is a sure way to slow down your blogs loading time. Also having too many different advertisers will slow down your blog. Try to stick to 2-3 monetize methods , regularly change them and see what works best for you.
