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Advice For Increasing Speed Of Your Blog

Published Tuesday, August 5, 2008 by bloggerblognet26206 | E-mail this post

1. Reduce size of page. My main blog used to be 37 entries. I checked and it was a massive 169K. This is too long so I reduced the size of the blog. I wonder how many visitors I lost because they didn't want to wait the 10-15 seconds for the page to load. Also if the page is too long it tends to overwhelm people.

2. Images take up the most space. So limit the number of images on a page. If there are too many images it can also be dazzling for the viewer.

3. Reduce size of images as much as possible. Using adobe photoshop I always "save for web" and save images at a low quality. This means you can reduce the size of images without much noticeable impact on the quality.

4. Check the site for 404s and 303s these are error messages. It means that the site is trying to load something unsuccessfully. Check stats or use Tamper Mozilla firefox download.

5. Be careful of having too many "widgets" on your site. A stat counter is definitely worth having, but if you have more than 1 and numerous other features you may be unnecessarily slowing the site down.

6. Choose the right blog software at the start. If I could start from scratch I would choose wordpress. I love wordpress because it has next page at the bottom. So even with short home pages its easy to get onto the next page. You content doesn't get lost in archives.

7. Be wary of having fancy javascript and flash animation which can take a long time to load. Also avoid unnecessary scripts

8. Use CSS rather than instyle html tags. It makes the page a lot lighter and saves duplicating save custom styles

9. Stay clear of too many tables, especially nested tables. Tables are not really designed for webdesign they create alot of html which becomes slow. With CSS (and a good designer) you can create more fluid effects with much less code.

10. Check you have sufficient bandwidth from your server, its worth having more than you need in case of an unexpected spike.