This guest post is by Devesh of WP Kube.
If you’re regular reader, you know that how much time problogger.net takes to load. Would you like to make your blog load faster than ProBlogger? Today I’m going to share eight simple tips to increase your blog speed. But first, you’ll need to know how quickly your blog is loading right now.
How to test your blog’s speed
So you can do a before-and-after comparison, take a moment to check how quickly your blog is loading now.
There are many tools online that let you test load speed, but I prefer to compare the loading speed of my blog against others—after all, that’s what your users will do.
One of my favorite tools for loading comparisons between two sites is WhichloadsFaster. To check your blog’s loading speed against a competing blog or a major website that’s used by readers in your niche, enter your site’s URL and that of the other site into the two boxes provided. Simple!
Here are the results of the loading speed comparison between my site and ProBlogger:
Comparing site load times
How to speed up your blog
Now that you know how your site’s loading in comparison to another, let’s look at the ways you can speed up your site’s load time.
Choose an efficient theme
Many bloggers make the mistake of choosing a free theme, or one that’s not properly coded. In my experience, every blogger should go for premium themes like Genesis, Thesis, or WooThemes. Premium themes tend to be much more carefully coded than free ones—Themeforest, for example, has some good themes, but many of the them aren’t well coded.
Review your hosting
Hosting plays an important role in your blog’s loading speed. Many new bloggers ignore this, but adjusting hosting can have a big impact on increasing your blog speed. Specifically, if you use shared hosting for your blog, you might want to look into switching to dedicated or grid hosting, as shared hosting can slow down load times when the demands on the shared server are high.
Remove extra widgets and plugins
This is one of the easiest things you can do to reduce your site’s load times. The more plugins you have on your blog, the longer it can take to load. Remove any extra widgets and plugins you’re using on your blog, which aren’t strictly necessary, and see what happens to your load time. Hand-code your functionality, and place it directly into the WordPress theme: this will reducing the number of calls each page load makes on the server.
Use the WordPress W3 Total Cache plugin
Now that you’ve reduced the number of plugins you’re using there’s one you should add! W3 Total Cache is a must-have plugin for any WordPress user. W3 Total Cache is a static caching plugin that generates HTML files that are served directly by Apache, without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. It’s compatible with most servers and server configurations, and gives you the choice of creating the cache on your own server, or using a content delivery network.
Use a content delivery network (CDN)
A CDN is a network of optimized servers around the world that store copies of your site’s data. By making your site available from various servers, the CDN maximizes bandwidth, and reduces your site’s load time. Using a CDN works really well if you have visitors from all over the world, as the servers closest to each user will be used to deliver content quickly. A CDN provider such as MaxCDN can provide great performance without putting a strain on your pocket.
Optimize your blog images
Many blogers don’t focus on optimizing blog images, but it’s a very effective way to increase your blog’s loading speed. There are many, many plugins that can help you to optimize blog images, but one of the best is WP Smush.it. I’m using it on many of my blogs and it really helps to make blog load faster. It offers an API that performs these optimizations (except for stripping JPEG metadata) automatically, and it integrates seamlessly with WordPress. Every image you add to a page or post will be automatically run through Smush.it behind the scenes—you don’t have to do anything differently.
This plugin:
- strips meta data from JPEGs
- optimizes JPEG compression
- converts certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
- strips the unused colours from indexed images.
Use social images instead of buttons
Social network buttons were among my site’s main problems: they take so much time to load, and can really slow your blog down. Displaying three or four buttons might be okay, but if you want to show all the buttons, I’d suggest you use images instead. Using images is the best way to show all the buttons without using a plugin.
These are eight simple tips that can help you to make your blog load faster then ProBlogger. What others can you share?
Devesh is young entrepreneur and part time blogger. Visit WP Kube for WordPress Tuorials & Hacks and Technshare for Make Money Blogging
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