Site speed plays very important role in the success of your site or blog. Visitors want quick result and they can't wait if your site is taking too much time in loading. Your visitors will not wait for the site and they will go back to others.Site speed also affect your search engine ranking. If your site is loading faster then you're likely to get more unique and returning visitors and your site will run towards success. The best thing is that you can speed up your site or blog without spending any money. You can follow the tips below to speed up your site loading time.
1. Reduce Posts on Main Page
It's a very important factor that affects your blog loading time. You must check how many posts are showing on the main page of your blog. You can adjust it to show only five to eight posts on the main page. For blogs hosted on blogger.com they can manage it by going to Settings | Posts and comments tab in the new blogger interface and select the number of post to show on the main page.
2. Show Only Summary of Articles on Main Page
In addition of reducing number of posts on main page it is also very important that you don't show full articles on the main page of your blog. You must show only summary of articles with a link to the main article.
3. Using JavaScript and Links
If you are using blogger platform for your blogs it is recommended to use only Blogger/Google widgets, links and html codes. If you are using third party widgets then you must check your blog speed by putting widgets of different developers and select the best which maintains optimal blog load speed.
4. Images
Images and videos are very important for a good content. Graphics make your content look attractive, but the more images and videos on your blog the longer it will take to load. So it is better to optimize your images to load faster. You can decrease the size of images, try uploading the images to Picasa web album.
5. Choose an Efficient Template
Theme is the base of your blog and if your theme is not well designed and optimized then after implementing all of the above tips you cannot reduce the load time of your blog. So it is important for you to choose your template which is light and take lesser time to load.
Below are some tools that you can use to check the speed of your site.
Tools to Evaluate the Speed of Your Site/Blog
• Page Speed: It's an open source extension for Firefox and Chrome that not only evaluates the performance of your site but also give suggestions to improve it.• YSlow: This extension is provided by Yahoo and is available for Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari and more.
• WebPagetest: It's an online tool to check site performance. It shows the result in numbers as well as in graph plus an optimization checklist.
• Google Webmaster Tools: Go to Google Webmaster Tools and under Labs go to Site Performance and install Page Speed.
• You can also find other tools on code.google.com/speed.
