These are some sure fire ways with the help of which you can reduce the loading time of your website or blog. It is mandatory for your website or blog to load as fast as possible as it serves as a parameter for the search engines that rank your site.
However, many of us in blogosphere do not tend to give as much importance to it as they should, which adversely effects their website rankings.
This post is intended for all you people who tend to overlook certain things that affect your website in a negative manner.
1. WP Rocket
This is a plug in which is god sent for many of us. The first thing we tend to do when our websites take a long time to load is download and activate the WP Rocket cache plug in.
It generates static html files and changes your blog so that it loads faster. If you are getting a lot of traffic to blog posts from sites like Digg or StumbleUpon and the likes, go ahead and install this plug in. You will notice the difference yourself.
2. Using minimum Images
It is advised to use vibrant images on your blog which will capture the imagination of your readers. It is easy to get carried away with it.
There are people who post 3-4 images in a post of 400 words which is ill advised. Reduce the number of images to one for each post. It is an SEO technique and will help your blog. Images take a much longer time to load than normal written content.
3. Image Hosting
If you are using images on your blog posts, it is a much better idea to host them on your own server rather than using a third party server for the purpose.
Although many of you engage in the practice in a bid to save bandwidth, but if you are looking to increase the speed of the website, you should know that local files always load faster than files which are stored in an external server.
Use external servers for extremely heavy files, but otherwise, it is the best bet to use your own server.
4. Use less Plug-in
Blogging on WordPress has been made very easy due to the presence of so many plug-in. If you think about it though, using too many plug-in is not a great idea as it eats into your loading speed to a great extent. Delete the plug-in which you feel are unnecessary from your blog or alternatively, you can replace them with simple coding.
Speed Up Your Website or Blog
5. Do not use Flash
Never use any content on your blog that requires flash. Company websites need them but avoid them on your blogs as much as you can. It slows down your website by threefold.
Unless yours is a huge website on the lines of Levi’s which do not care about SEO or Google calculating your page load time, avoid flash altogether. The trend is that increasing amount of your visitors do not prefer flash just because it takes an awful lot of time to load.
6. Control Ads
Advertisement on your blog is what makes you money online but they take a lot of time to load. Most PPC and CPM ads are made by inexperienced people nowadays and are full of coding errors which affect the loading speed of your blog adversely.
Just stick to the simple text link ads and image ads which load faster than the rest. Avoid in-text ads as much as you can.
7. Get rid of all those gadgets
A person who is reading a post on your blog does not need to know the time of the day and the date from your blog.
That data is there on his pc, laptop, and cell phone – wherever he is reading the blog from. Do not populate your blog/site with such useless gadgets which slow down your website or blog.
8. Theme of the blog
A theme which has a simple code structure and is not too heavy is recommended for your blog. Use something which is professional looking, easy on the eyes and will not take up too much time to download. This will help your blog to load faster.
9. A good web host
It does make a difference in the long run. You should hire a reputed globally renowned company to host your High traffic websites. Pay for their services and you will reap in the rewards.
10. Keep it simple.
This is an advice for every blogger out there. It is very important to keep your blog as simple as you can. Keep it free from unnecessary widgets, links and gadgets and your site will be a fast one. It also helps in search engine optimization for your website/ blog.
If you can follow these simple steps, you will be on the road to success in cyberspace!