It’s a no brainer that web users don’t like slow websites. A slow loading website can lead to a higher bounce rates, as well as lower pageviews on your site. A study done by KISSmetrics shows that 47% of web users expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and a 1 second delay decreases user satisfaction by 16%. Go ahead and test your website page load speed using GTmetrix. If you find that your website is taking a while to load, this blog post will help you bring that page load time down a bit with some easy-to-implement tips.
Without further ado, here are some tips to help you speed up your blog:
1) Decrease the number of post displayed on your site
Most blog platforms will default to showing 10 or so blog posts when a user arrives on the site. This affects page load times as your website needs to load each post (and all of their images). Simply decreasing the number of posts that are displayed on the main page can help you bring down your page load times.
2) Javascript location
Without digging too deep into coding and things that only a web designer would understand, you can decrease page load time by simply moving all custom javascript to the bottom of your blog.
3) Hosting Solution
Your web host plays a part in how your website performs. Simply choosing the right host can make huge improvements to your page load time. Here are a few things to look for with your current host that should help you decide if you’re with the right provider:
- Bandwidth - Imagine a highway with two lanes, you can only fit so many cars on the highway before there is a traffic jam. You’re fighting with everyone else to get to your exit but it’s taking a while because everyone else is trying to do the same thing. When it comes to bandwidth, make sure you have a lot of space (4 lane highway) and that you’re not sharing it with anyone else. This way, you can get to your exit without any delays.
- Up time - Your website is no good if the servers are down. You need to make sure that your hosting provider is reliable. The best way to make sure of this is to check to see if they offer guaranteed up time. This will guarantee that your servers are up at least 99.99% of the time.
- Dedicated or Shared server - Referring back to the bandwidth section above, are you sharing the highway with anyone else or is this your own private highway? Your best bet for delivering the quickest results is to have a dedicated highway to yourself.
4) Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a server setup that takes all of your static files (Images, CSS, Javascript, ect) and serves them to your users from servers that are closest to them. This is the most efficient way to deliver your media files to your users and will ultimately help decrease load times. All of the big blogs are doing it, why aren’t you?
5) Optimize Images
Images take up a lot of space and can take a while to load depending on the size and format. Luckily, there are tools that you can use to bring your images inline with best practices. Yahoo! has a cool tool called Smush.it that you can use to help optimize your images. If you’re on WordPress, there’s a plugin called WP Smush.it that does that same thing but within your platform.
5.5) Optimizing images even further
Say you have 10 images throughout your entire page. These 10 images have to load at the same time even if a user doesn’t see them. There’s a plugin for WordPress called jQuery Image Lazy Load and it will only load your images if your user scroll to that section. This saves your servers a bit of effort and will ultimately help lower load times.
6) Post Revisions
How many times do you revise a post before publishing it? You probably answered “a few times.” WordPress saves all of those revisions therefore taking up extra space that you could have used for something else. There’s a WordPress plugin called Revision Control and it will help you control the amount of revisions that are saved by your WordPress blog.
7) Pingbacks & Trackbacks
Pingbacks and trackbacks are a lot of work for your WordPress site. This is unnecessary and simply turning it off can help you decrease page load times. If you are unfamiliar with what pingbacks and trackbacks are, you can find more information about them using the links below.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/comments/trackbacks/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/comments/pingbacks/
Conclusion
These are just a few simple tips to help you reduce the amount of time it takes your website to load. Implement a few (or all) of these recommendations and test your load time. Make sure to note your bounce rate and sessions before and after to see how an improved page load time impact your overall site performance.
