Welcome to the second instalment of the “Love Your Blog” series here on Middle Aged Mama – where we will look at how to make your blog load faster!
(In the first instalment, it was all about the best free WordPress plugins for bloggers – clink on the link if you missed it).
So why is it important to make sure your blog load faster?
In this day of instant everything, if your blog takes longer than a few seconds to load, people will just click away – missing out on all your bloggy brilliance! It’s a tragedy to be sure, but we all get sick of the www (world wide wait!) at times.
To check the speed of your blog, head to Pingdom to run a test. If it takes longer than 10 seconds to load, here are four tips to help you make your blog load faster:
- Be very selective about the plugins you use. Although plugins can add much to your site, they also use RAM and can slow things down. To check which plugins are the worst offenders, instal and run the Plugin Performance Profiler. In my case, All in One SEO and Mailchimp were the most resource hungry – but worth it, in my view. Oh, and don’t forget to uninstal this plugin once you are done!
- Choose blog hosting in the same geographic area as your target audience. So Aussie bloggers – make sure you use Aussie hosting! Not only will this improve your site’s speed, it also has benefits for your Google ranking 🙂 .
- Compress your images. You can do this manually with each image, or use a plugin like WP Smush.
- Use a Caching plugin eg W3 Cache. When you return to a frequently accessed website, your browser likely keeps much of the static data from that site stored in its cache. It can “re-use” this data, so it loads faster. Caching plugins operate in much the same way, so that your site loads far more quickly for frequent visitors.
If you really want to get into the nitty gritty of how to speed up your website, Google Developers offers heaps of information – but I must admit most of it is way over the head of the average blogger (like me!) …
Have you got any tips you can pass on, on how to make your blog load faster?
Linking up with Kylie Purtell for IBOT.
Save
Save