7 Tips To Speed Up Your Blog Page Load Time

Blog visitors are key to success of your blog and as a blogger it is your job to increase visitor numbers. One way to attract more visitors is to speed up your blog load time and create a faster, more efficient, and improved visitor experience.

Your visitors will love you for it, so might Google and other search engines. Your blog might rank higher in search results as page load time is one of the ranking factors.

Check your blog load time

First thing first: Let us check your blog’s current load time speed. Run the blog speed tests at these two sites to see how fast or how slow your blog is currently:

• Google’s PageSpeed Insights
• GTMetrix

Any score above 75 is pretty good in my book as it means that your site loads faster than the average. If your score is below 75 or if your want to get an even better page loading time, continue reading for some not-too-techy tips to speed up your blog page load time.

How to speed up your blog page load time

• Choose the right host

Having a hosting account is the first step towards having a speedy site as free hostsare usually not too fast and reliable.

Eventually you may outgrow the hosting account and may need to upgrade to a dedicated server but at first it is more than enough to run your blog from a standard hosting account that you can get for around $50 per year. Bluehost is WordPress’ preferred choice.

• Choose the right platform

Your blogging platform is what you build your blog on, so it is important to get that right. For bloggers WordPress is the option to go for. It is free, it is open-source and comes as a very light and speedy platform out of the box.

WordPress is used by the majority of big bloggers and gets regularly updated with cleaner and leaner coding and functionality. See how to install WordPress.

• Limit the number of plugins you use

I love WordPress plugins as they allow me to add any functionality to my site that I may wish to have. The more plugins you add, the more CSS and Javascripts you have on your blog though, and that hurts your blog’s speed and load time. Keep a close eye on the amount of plugins you have installed.

I’m currently down to 7 plugins on my blog, down from having some 20+ not too long ago. Check the impact each plugin has on the site load by testing the site with the plugin activated and without the plugin. Consider whether the plugin truly adds any value to your blog before installing it.

Ballpark figure is to try and keep your WordPress blog to 10 plugins or less installed and activated.

• Choose the right Theme

Premium themes like Thesis and Genesis are developed clean coded, they give you a great flexibility and are speedy out of the box. Premium themes also allow you to customize your blog and in many cases add few pieces of custom code instead of installing another plugin.

Premium themes also have support behind them and are continuously upgraded and improved. This is not always the case with the free-to-use WordPress themes.

• Keep the image size low

Images are an integral part of any blog, they brand your blog and they keep your visitors interested in your blog posts.

What many bloggers do wrong is that they upload the high quality image and resize it inside the WordPress interface to fit their blog post area. This is not good as the size of your images will be huge and will negatively impact the load time.

Keep the image size low, somewhere around 50kb or less for main post image. You do that by resizing it to the exact size you need and compressing it by using “Save for web” or similar in your image editor before you actually upload it to your blog.

• Cache your blog

This is arguably the simplest way of speeding up your blog’s load time. Install a caching plugin and activate it. It will automatically speed up your blog by generating static files and serving those files to your visitors. I use “W3 Total Cache” and it does a great job. Search for it in your WordPress plugin interface and activate it.

• Use a Content Delivery Network

“W3 Total Cache” plugin allows you to add CDN (Content Delivery Network) support as well. CDN makes your blog load much faster by offloading the static files to data centers around the world. I use MaxCDN on this blog which also compresses some my blog’s files.