Time it takes for a site to open is very important. In case your site does not load in about 7 seconds, chances are people will skip it and move on to next blog.
Do you want this to happen to your blog? I am damn sure NO. So, what basic things one can do to add fire to your blog and make it open like knife in butter box.
Here is list of basic tweaking and simple management, that will surely help in adding some speed to your blog:
1. Image Format & Optimization:
Images take the major chunk of bandwidth on any blog. It is very important that we optimize images and strike a perfect balance between the quality & size of a photo. If you are using Abode PhotoShop, then must use option ‘Save for Web’ to optimize images. Also, you need to select correct image format for a particular image you show.
JPEG/JPG: Use this format for actual photos that involves graphics.
GIF: Use this format for showing images showing logo or any other text stuff.
BMP: Better you never use image in this format, will kill your blog.
You can also use Online Image optimizer to accomplish such tasks. Here is one Dynamic Drive Online Image Optimizer.
2. CSS & Site code optimization:
Usually a blog design is guarded by CSS styling. Evertime a page in blog loads, all the elements in CSS file is read and design to the blog page is rendered. Hence, it is very important that CSS code of your blog is optimised. Manually you can remove parts in CSS that are actually not being used
(NOTE: You should know what you are doing and make sure you back your CSS file before trying out anything)
You can also use online tools to optimize or clean the CSS code of your blog, Here is one widely used tool Clean CSS.
3. Minimise Number of JS & other codes:
More the Javascript Codes and page elements like IFRAME, objects etc, more the time site will take to load. So, one should try to minimise their number. Google, CPX or any other ad code will generally be javascript code. You need to be very careful in number of ad codes you put on a single page.
Using Online tool at Pingdom, you can easily find out number of images, external objects, total objects, plug-ins, CSS code size and much more. Here is the snap shot of tothepc.com:
Another good online tools to analyse various elements of a site/blog in detail is: WebsiteOptimization
4. Using Width and Height Tags:
Yes, this is very important to define the attributes of an image in terms of width and height in the post or template. In case, no height or width is defined, browser will look to load the image first and then load the page.ÂÂ
Alternatively, if width and height is already defined, browser will load the page and then images will come up.Practically the site will load faster will images coming on later. You can easily assign such tags, if you still use Microsoft Front Page (like me) then it is very easy.
Just copy paste the image in the editor and width/height attributes are added by itself.You can also, use following code for the same: <img align=”center” width=”420″ src=”URL of image” height=”427″ style=”border: #ffffff 4px solid” />
5. Using Slash on weblinks on your site:
Making your browser task easier will always help in loading site faster. Another way to do so is giving full weblink. For example www.tothepc.com/info – in this case browser will take some time to search for exact location.
In case we have link as www.tothepc.com/info/ – less time will be taken by browser, as it will know the link is in directory ‘info’.
Above were few very simple ways to speed up the blog. Another way to do so is minimize the number of posts on the front page. I have seen blogs with lengthy & heavy 10 posts stacked on front page. You just wait and wait!
Also, if you run a photoblog: then it is always recommended to post thumbnails instead of Full pic. Not only will this save you bandwidth but enhance user experience with faster blog load.
I am sure, there are many other ways to prep up your blog. Please feel free share some here!
