Saturday, 18 May 2013

How to reduce blog page load time




Hello Readers, in this post we will learn useful tips which will help you to reduce your blog page load time. Page load time is a big factor that affects the blogging. Almost every reader hates the slow opening websites and blogs. Not only the readers, but the Search engines robots and crawlers hate the blogs and websites which have a higher page load time. It will affect the overall SEO and quality of your Blog. I am sure being a blogger you want to improve your blog's quality and reduce the page load time. But how we can do this? We will find the answer to this important question later in this article.
reduce page load time
If your Blog has a lesser page load time, you will be able to attract more users to your blog which will help you increase your readership. Sometimes the search engine bots and crawlers find it difficult to crawl the WebPages having more page load time, hence they skip those pages. It will result in poor indexing and will surely affect your organic traffic. Before going to discuss the remedies for the page load time, we shall take a look at the factors which affect the page load time:

Factors that increase the page load time:


  • External JavaScript Codes
  • External Images
  • Heavy Blogger Templates
  • XHTML Errors
  • Unnecessary Widgets and Plug-ins
  • External Hyperlinks and many more.

I have mentioned a few problems that may increase your blog page load time. Now we shall take a look at the tips that will help you reduce the page load time.

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Reduce Page Load Time

JavaScript:

JavaScript is very important for blogger and other blogging platforms. But we need to use it wisely because it can increase the page load time of your blog. You should not be using a lot of JavaScript codes in your blog. If you have requirements to use plenty of JavaScript codes in your blog then you should try to store the JS code inside the template rather than just using it from external resources. It will help you to reduce the page load time. You can store the JS code in your template's head section using the script tags.

Post Images:

Almost every blogger uses images and other graphics to explain their blog posts. They are an important part of our articles. But it may take time to load on to your page and increase the page load time. To avoid this, you should resize the images using the height and width attributes of image tag like this:

<img src="Source of Image" height="in pixels" width="in pixels"/>

Template Images:

Most of us use the custom templates to make their blog look and feel better. But custom templates have external images. The external images takes time to load on your blog and increases the page load time. You can save all the external images in a draft post in your blog and replace all the external images links in your template with the new links. This will surely help you to reduce your page load time.

Background Images:

Avoid using images in the background of your template. As mentioned above images take more time to load and in case of any error your images will not load. It will result in a bad looking blog template. You can use CSS style rules to replace the background images.

Limit Posts on Homepage:

You should not display many article on the homepage. It will increase the page load time. Ideally you should be displaying only 5 articles or whatever count suits you, to reduce the page load time.

Use Post Summary:

Displaying full articles on homepage can affect you page load time. You should be displaying only the introductory paragraph on the homepage and the rest of the article on the posts page.

Blog Template:

You should be using good quality blog templates. Templates with flash content and heavy images will take more time to load. You should be avoiding such templates and use simple/light templates for your blog.

Advertisement units:

Almost every blogger choose to display ads on their blogs to earn money online. But you should consider using lesser ad units to minimize the page load time. You can also delay ads to load after the page load using jQuery. Enclose the ads code in jQuery ready function to load ads after the page load, like this:

$(document).ready(function(){Ad codes Here});

Remove unnecessary widgets

Many bloggers install unnecessary plugins and widgets in their blog like separate social networks widgets for all networks, stats counters or other flash based widgets. You should not be using too many widgets and plug-in. You can add all in one social network widget and all in one social sharing buttons widget to reduce the page load time.

External Links

External Hyperlinks degrade your sites performance and SEO. Many bloggers display their visitors and other stats using the external hyperlinks. You need to avoid using these kinds of external links. You can also remove hyperlinks from the comments section.

I hope I covered almost all points in this article. If you follow these tips, I am sure you can reduce your page load time to a great extend. If you think I missed any important point, you can mention it in the article; I will update it in my post.

You should also check out our Blogging and SEO section for more blogger tips and tricks.

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Author: Mohammad Zafar Ahmad
Zafar Ahmad is PHP/Java Developer and a Passionate Blogger. He likes to write about Blogging tips, SEO tips, Blogger Widgets, Smart phones, Tablets and Online Earnings. You can find him on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

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