In this post we discuss about how to speed up blog ,tips to improve blog speed and different blog speed test methods.
If your blog isn’t up to speed and is far behind the performance benchmarks, it can have dire consequences.
Always when you start a new blog , you will find the best theme and tweak it for better performance.You optimize it for fast load and quick response. But after a few months or even years it becomes slow and heavy. A slow blog can result in a drastic loss of traffic, reduction in search engine ranking.
The ideal load time as experts says should be less than 2 seconds. No reader or netizen will wait for a web page for more than 15 or 20 seconds.So if your website is becoming slow you will witness a drastic reduction in traffic. Also chances are there that search engines may penalize slow websites.
Reason behind slow blog or websites
There are many reasons that can cause slow performance. Starting from the servers used at your hosting locations to the plugins and images used in your blog.
Size of your CSS and JavaScript files as well as the number of such script files may introduce performance bottlenecks.
If you are using blogging platforms like WordPress or Blogger, Check the plugins you have added. Installing lot of plugins will introduce heavy scripts ,CSS etc. This needs to be loaded to the browser to complete the rendering of web page.
Another reason behind slow blog is he use of many images in the page.
Loading all the static resources from the same server again will increase traffic to the same server and will reduce the performance.
How to make your blog or website load faster
There are many things needs to be considered to improve the performance of your website.
1. Compress CSS and JavaScript files
The number and size of your script and css files can directly influence the performance of your blog. If your hosted web server is Apache,then you have plenty of option to improve the blog speed. You can instruct your web server by adding commands in .htaccess file to compress the script and css files.
Read Speed up website -Compress CSS/JavaScript using GZIP/DEFLATE compression
Also you can Check website/ web page for css/script Gzip/ Deflate compression.
2. Minify JS (JavaScript) and CSS Files to Speed Up Your Website.
Minify (also called minification) is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code. using minification you can reduce the size of CSS and Script (javaScript) files. The smaller the size of the file the faster your blog become.
Read more about free tools to minify and how to Minify JS (JavaScript) and CSS Files to speed up your Website.
3. File Caching to Speed Up Website and Web Page Load Time
Caching the files will improve the server response time. The page load depends on server response time.So file caching will directly influence the blog performance.Caching files in browser or proxy rather than requesting every time reduces the network traffic between the server, the client. Here also you can utilize the .htaccess file.
Read more about how to speed up websites by enabling .htaccess Caching using mod_expires and mod_headers
4. Optimize Images for Blog and Websites
Optimized images results in faster websites as well as meaningful representations. SO it is very important to make sure that you use optimized images. Read more about How to Optimize Images for Blog and Websites and also Top Tools to Optimize Images and Speed Up Your Site.
5. Combine your Script , CSS file.
Combining multiple Script files like JavaScript or CSS files to reduce the number of files will improve the blog performance. This reduces the number of HTTP requests fired to the server.
6. Placement of Style sheets and scripts.
Normally placing style-sheets (CSS files) on top of the pages helps in faster page load. On the other hands the scripts block parallel downloads and if you keep scripts on top,the other parts of the page will get rendered afterwards.
7. Use content delivery servers , remove duplicate scripts and use effective plugins.
Host your static files like style sheets and scripts in content delivery servers. Or at least keep it is a different server so that these contents will be downloaded parallel. The traffic to a single server will be reduced and thus improve the performance of your blog.
Also find and remove the duplicate script and CSS files. if you are using blog platforms like WordPress then you can use effective plugins to improve performance. Plugins like WP Super Cache generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. Read 9 Must Have WordPress Plugins.
After applying all the above guidelines you can test your Website Completely. Also you can find how your website will perform if accessed from different geographical locations. Read Website Performance Test From Different Geographical Locations
Finally you can test your website against the benchmarks. There are many services available to test your website against benchmarks. Read How to Test your Website Speed Against Benchmarks?
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