There is a very famous saying that “Time is Money”
and that seems to very true now a days. Everyone seems to be in hurry
whether on roads, offices, home or even on internet. Yes its true that
if any website takes lots of loading time than people leave this site
and hence you lose a precious visitor which may become customer in
future. I have seen many sites on internet with lots of content and
functionality which may good for some visitors but most of the visitors
will be irritate by this. Although world is very fast right and so
internet speeds but still millions of visitors are using same old
dial-up internet and hence they will not enjoy your site if it takes
lots of time to load. Also search engine may also ban your blog if its
not quick enough.
1. Choose Top Web Server.
If you run even the simplest of website
form in HTML files but on cheap web server than its not going to help
your cause. I know that premium web host are very expensive and not
everybody can afford to buy Top web server but its your investment for
future which will definitely pay off. Good webhost not only speeds up
your blog loading but they also make sure that your blog will be up and
running 99.9% which means more readers for your blog. Internet khazana
recommends Hostgator webhosting for blogs.
2. Optimize Images.
Next big thing that may reduce your blog
time are images of your blog. If you blog has too many heavy images and
without proper information like “alt tag”, “image size” etc than if
will take lots of time to load in visitors browser and hence more
irritation for visitor. Its better to only place one or two image sin a
single post. Always mention the size of each image. Another trick is to
host your blog themes images on to a third party server like Picasa, Flickr
etc because servers of these images are fastest in the world and your
blog themes images will definitely load faster than your one.
3. Use Less Plugins.
We all love plugins but too many plugins
will make our lives painful by taking extra-bit of time while loading.
Its very difficult to choose between which plugin to use or not but try
to use only essential plugins and disable plugins which are only giving
you extra functionality like WP-DBManager plugin
which is used to optimizes your database but this plugin will make your
life difficult as it consumes lots of resources when it is active.
4. Try to avoid WordPress Related Posts plugin.
Believe me or not most time taken by any
WordPress plugin is Related Posts plugin which executes code in order
to find latest and related posts every time page loads. So its better to
use third party plugins like Linkwithin, Outbrians etc. Another great option is to use Facebook Recommendation plugin which is the fastest of all.
5. Buy Premium Theme.
Its a fact that badly written Free
templates or themes may take longer to load in browsers as compare to
the premium themes written by professional programmers. Also it has been
the case that most of the free themes contains malicious code which may
be harmful to your blog if you afford to buy premium theme go for it.
6. Install Cache Plugin.
If you have not install any cache plugin yet than go and first install Wp-Super Cache or Wp-Total Cache plugin
for WordPress now. You may already know that WordPress is uses PHP
which delivers content dynamically to users which is good in terms of
updated content but of course your blog will always look for new content
and hence more time it take to load. The best option is to convert your
blog files into static HTML files so that it can be stored on visitors
browser for future reference.
7. Optimize Database.
Initially it may not seen for you as a
problem but when your blog grows you database get lots of comments,
posts, pages and hence it creates more tables. As your blogs database
size increases it tends to take more time to find the data which is
being requested by users. So after time to time is essential for you to
clean up your database and remove all unnecessary database tables. For
this you can use WP-DBManager plugin for WordPress but remember after using this plugin deactivate this plugin as this plugin takes huge server resources.
8. Enable GZIP Compression in Cpanel.
As the
name suggests GZIP Compression if enabled will compress all the files
present on your server so that your blog consumes less bandwidth as well
as files and folders transfer quickly because of the less size. Suppose
if your blog images are of 10 MB in size but after compression there
size reduced to 6 MB only than 6 MB download quickly than 10 MB. For
this to activate login into your cPanel and click on Optimize Website
icon. It will show you the option of enabling or disabling compression.
Just select Compress all Content and click Update settings button.
9. Avoid too many Advertisements and Java Script Codes.
Money is the name of the game but for
few bucks you will make your blog look like junk and also to load
slowly. Always try to maintain between content and advertisements. How
often we see that if we remove Adsense code our blogs start to perform
better. So try to reduce advertisements, java script codes and effects.
10. Lazy Load Images.
Its a good idea to only load images when
visitor request them. By default all the images on your blog page
automatically load when someone request it. But after installing Lazy Load plugin for WordPress images will load only when visible to user.