This guest post is by Devesh of WP Kube.
If you’re regular reader, you know that how much time problogger.net takes to load. Would you like to make your blog load faster than ProBlogger? Today I’m going to share eight simple tips to increase your blog speed. But first, you’ll need to know how quickly your blog is loading right now.
How to test your blog’s speed
So you can do a before-and-after comparison, take a moment to check how quickly your blog is loading now.
There are many tools online that let you test load speed, but I prefer to compare the loading speed of my blog against others—after all, that’s what your users will do.
One of my favorite tools for loading comparisons between two sites is WhichloadsFaster. To check your blog’s loading speed against a competing blog or a major website that’s used by readers in your niche, enter your site’s URL and that of the other site into the two boxes provided. Simple!
Here are the results of the loading speed comparison between my site and ProBlogger:
Comparing site load times
How to speed up your blog
Now that you know how your site’s loading in comparison to another, let’s look at the ways you can speed up your site’s load time.
Choose an efficient theme
Many bloggers make the mistake of choosing a free theme, or one that’s not properly coded. In my experience, every blogger should go for premium themes like Genesis, Thesis, or WooThemes. Premium themes tend to be much more carefully coded than free ones—Themeforest, for example, has some good themes, but many of the them aren’t well coded.
Review your hosting
Hosting plays an important role in your blog’s loading speed. Many new bloggers ignore this, but adjusting hosting can have a big impact on increasing your blog speed. Specifically, if you use shared hosting for your blog, you might want to look into switching to dedicated or grid hosting, as shared hosting can slow down load times when the demands on the shared server are high.
Remove extra widgets and plugins
This is one of the easiest things you can do to reduce your site’s load times. The more plugins you have on your blog, the longer it can take to load. Remove any extra widgets and plugins you’re using on your blog, which aren’t strictly necessary, and see what happens to your load time. Hand-code your functionality, and place it directly into the WordPress theme: this will reducing the number of calls each page load makes on the server.
Use the WordPress W3 Total Cache plugin
Now that you’ve reduced the number of plugins you’re using there’s one you should add! W3 Total Cache is a must-have plugin for any WordPress user. W3 Total Cache is a static caching plugin that generates HTML files that are served directly by Apache, without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. It’s compatible with most servers and server configurations, and gives you the choice of creating the cache on your own server, or using a content delivery network.
Use a content delivery network (CDN)
A CDN is a network of optimized servers around the world that store copies of your site’s data. By making your site available from various servers, the CDN maximizes bandwidth, and reduces your site’s load time. Using a CDN works really well if you have visitors from all over the world, as the servers closest to each user will be used to deliver content quickly. A CDN provider such as MaxCDN can provide great performance without putting a strain on your pocket.
Optimize your blog images
Many blogers don’t focus on optimizing blog images, but it’s a very effective way to increase your blog’s loading speed. There are many, many plugins that can help you to optimize blog images, but one of the best is WP Smush.it. I’m using it on many of my blogs and it really helps to make blog load faster. It offers an API that performs these optimizations (except for stripping JPEG metadata) automatically, and it integrates seamlessly with WordPress. Every image you add to a page or post will be automatically run through Smush.it behind the scenes—you don’t have to do anything differently.
This plugin:
- strips meta data from JPEGs
- optimizes JPEG compression
- converts certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
- strips the unused colours from indexed images.
Use social images instead of buttons
Social network buttons were among my site’s main problems: they take so much time to load, and can really slow your blog down. Displaying three or four buttons might be okay, but if you want to show all the buttons, I’d suggest you use images instead. Using images is the best way to show all the buttons without using a plugin.
These are eight simple tips that can help you to make your blog load faster then ProBlogger. What others can you share?
Devesh is young entrepreneur and part time blogger. Visit WP Kube for WordPress Tuorials & Hacks and Technshare for Make Money Blogging
Tips.
I think most people need to realize that the loading of pages usually depends on outside services and how they are performing. But you can always load certain things first like content and then make an order of how you want areas on your page to load. For example do content first, then items needed near the top of the page, and work your way down etc.
Spot on… So much has to do with providers and usage on the network your system is being run on. I upgraded our service and now see huge improvements.
I am going to agree here, at least in terms of loading speed consistency; not to say that the advice in this article is in any way wrong, but I feel that you’ll fine a lot more consistent improvements in loading time through which services you are using over (but not excluding) how many plug-ins you have installed.
yeah plugins also nake blog slow down
Hi Devesh,
I have just stopped using the Wibiya tool bar (Sorry Wibiya) it was slowing my blog down way to much. Good tip for using icons/images for your social media.
Thanks
Pete
I really love Wibiya but it really does slow a blog down.
Great article Devesh; really helpful stuff.
I ran Wibiya for about a day, but couldn’t stand how much it bogged us down. I ditched it that evening.
We just got rid of the Wibiya toolbar also. I really liked the features, but loading time was more important to us.
I don’t know why some people love wibiya and other type of toolbars. Glad to see you guys stopped using it.
Thanks for the comment.
This is really an eye opener as I thought that the blog speed is normally due to the hosting server and the number of plugins being used.
The removal of plugins, bars etc is probably the wisest thing to do.
Nice article!
Cheers!
Glad you like it.
Thanks for the comment Christos.
All great points to follow..loading time is I take into count a lot becasue no wants to sit there an whole minute to watch your page load..you will lose readers.
“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”
I found getting rid of commenting systems such as Disqus and Intense Debate reduces load times. I just used CSS to make default WordPress comments look prettier and it works just as well.
One of the things I need to consider is CDN – I have just never been sure of how to make use of it or how much money to invest in it, but one thing is for certain – my site is way too slow.
In my experience, it’s super cheap. My cost to use Amazon’s CDN for December was $5.80 for a blog with 155k total visits for the month.
Very important this post!
Thank´s!
Those are pretty basic things, but one of the things that WP sites and free themes are most guilty of are too many HTTP requests – trying to load half a dozen or more each of CSS files and JavaScript files can really be a drag on loading speed. I discussed some of the more technical aspects in a blog post a while back, which is still relevant:
http://www.dgibson.net/blog/article.cfm/articleid=25/More-Tips-To-Improve-Web-Site-Performance
I’m not saying this post is bad, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg and getting more in depth can definitely lead to better results.
ha, ha… these are awesome tips my friend! now, I was wondering if you guys had any problems with dreamhost (shared version) — sometimes whenever I update my blog with a new post, it takes minutes to load a new page, unless I go out there and reset my PS (I guess it’s a private server or something related).
Help!
Just be careful of that Cache if you are using Adsense.
really? I have had to switch off caching because it serves up gobbledy-gook sometimes.
Would Adsense and a Caching plugin be the unholy pair that causes this?
There is a rumor that it causes Adsense to display out of date ads from lower bidders.
Exactly,i tested this thing and found that it happens,cookies plays games behind the scenes and this way ads are managed by Adsense which is the top advertising program.
Thanks Tyrant for letting us know. I wasn’t aware about this issue.
That’s good to know! Thanks.
one thing you forget to add, is to optimize database and disable post revision feature in wordpress.
W3 Total cache +CDN are premium not all of them able to buy instead of it use Wp-Super cache plugin to speed up wordpress.
Reduce as much plugin as you can
I use WooThemes and they are very sound front and back – I also agree that large images is one of the more common causes of slow page load times, though I generally use PhotoShop to optimize mine. I found I also had to remove the AddToAny widget from my pages as it was causing them to slow down by up to 2 minutes.
Thanks for the tips. recently, i’ve considered to use CDN service, but not sure what company should i use. I think I will try MaxCDN :D
Thanks for the tips.
My blog is loading fine so far.
Just FYI W3 Total Cache has not been working well since 3.x
How so? Seems to be working fine on all the sites I have it installed on.
Feels proud to see a guest post by an Indian. CHeers, Devesh!.
Thanks for the tips….:)
Great solid step by step advice. Though the caching plugin seems to not play well with our product at times.
Nice Post.Thanks for your kind information.I’ve checked with WhichloadsFaster tool between mysite and problogger.Here are the results of the loading speed comparison between my site and ProBlogger
http://whichloadsfaster.com/?l=dailyblogscoop.com&r=problogger.net
have to say i have been obsessed with increasing my blogs load time recently as it was taking up to 25 seconds to load and after hours of playing around with it it was simply that my theme didn’t seem to like thumbnail images for posts. very strange but my blog loads fine now which is great. Guest post coming up on pro blogger on the 8th can’t wait!
I had HUGE problems with W3 Total Cache and WP 3 — I lost all my Google search traffic. Literally 0 visitors from any of the search engines for a full week while I tried to figure out why. Don’t ask me how, but it all came back the day I took W3 Total Cache off. I also had problems with broken image links with Smush It. Again, had to take it off.
I want fast load times (a fair number of my readers are on low bandwidth in internet cafes as they travel in other countries), but those two solutions caused too many other problems.
For me, I was better off to optimize photos in PhotoShop (I can get them almost as small as SmushIt) and only use images where they really add to a post (that is, not just eye candy).
Load times are about 4 seconds — I’m interested to use the service you suggested and check it against some other sites.
Thanks for the info!
A very efficient method of increasing the speed of your site is to compress all of your images. You will be amazed how much faster your site loads with compressed images and the quality of the image remains almost the same.
Chip
Also, watch out for Twitter plugins and counter badges. Definitely a load time hog! While I still debate whether to remove them, I believe they are an important part of interaction for the readers.
Haha, mine was 17% faster than Probloggger, without any tweaks! It pays to pay for good hosting.
Hey Dev,
Very cool that your contributing to ProBlogger now! I have enjoyed reading and contributing to your blog over the past few weeks. Page load speed will only increase to the overall SEO picture over time. Keep up the great work.
I’ve tested speeds a few times today and they vary wildly, even without doing anything. But I added the WP Smush.it anyway. Now it is only 52% faster then PB, it was also 7x slower and 5x faster.
I love the title of this post. My blog loads so fast but thats probably because I haven’t gotten round to adding as many plugins. Great post.
http://stylifiq.blogspot.com/p/overview.html
I got really obsessed with load times when I redesigned my blog last year. I use the SWIFT theme because of its claims to be the fastest theme. I use the DBCache Reloaded, Hyper Cache, and PHP Speedy WP plugins to speed up my blog. The first two plugins, in particular, really help bring down the blog’s load times.
I put my images up on Google Picasa. That, to me, is kind of like having a CDN for images. Another thing I could suggest is using the Google Code Project to serve up your JavaScript files instead of your own server.
I think the most important tip, though, is choosing the right hosting provider. Shared hosting is the cheapest option out there, but it can hurt you. I wish Virtual Private Server hosting were more affordable.
Hmm, page load times are getting more and more important for seo. A very timely post indeed
Yay! I’m 63% faster! I made a bunch of changes around Christmas-time when Google told me I had a 17 second loading speed, slower than 99% of all websites. I made a bunch of small changes and boom :)
Speed really can be an advantage. If your search engine is slow, users find another one. On the Web it matters.
One of my favorite books has the perfect title … “It’s not the Big that Eat the Small, It’s the Fast that Eat the Slow.” So true.
Beautiful tips and great focus.
Investing in a good hosting company can solve half of your problem, and using minimum plug-in is a plus point. Some nice tips here, like the idea of using CDN.
Hm, an interesting read here! Speed is of the essence in making our readers feel more assured and comfortable, especially in today’s fast-paced society. No-one likes lag-time ;-)
I have to say that the best tip here (while they are all good) was to disable the Social buttons. Especially the twitter button, it is horrendous when it comes to loading.
When comes to cdn I feel maxcdn is bit costlier than other cdn providers. When it comes to themes reducing javascripts and other gimmic images will helps the blog to load faster.
Reviewing my hosting provider is the best thing I ever did to my site to load it more faster and attract more especially from search engine. I transferred Entrepinoy Bank hosting from GoDaddy to Hostmonster last December 31, 2010. And I have no regrets. My site load faster at Hostmonster and now attracts 1,300+ visitors a day compared to 700+ visitors a day while in GoDaddy.
I would recommend YSlow from Yahoo for testing the many aspects of your page that would effect page speed. It even has things like imagine optimisation built straight into it.
Thanks for the tips – I always find it a personal challenge to delete plugins and buttons – on the one hand you want to demonstrate your site is social and provides useful elements for your readers (and of course encourage people to share your content) and then you want your site to load faster.
This is the kind of tech advice that keeps me up at night because I don’t have a clue on what to do.
Good tips Devesh!
I noticed when Twitter was having problems it chocked my blog up, Why? because I used their hosted “tweet” button…
The WP cache plug-in comes in handy when you have a post with a LOT of comments as that can take a very long time to load.
I also use a free Firefox app called “SEO Doctor” – it displays the load time of any page at the bottom of your browser.
– Marc
Hosting can’t be underestimated. I’ve seen blogs that’ve been streamlined to the hilt – and then the server slows everything right down.
Thanks for the tips, I’m always looking for ways to improve my blog.
Excellent tips friend, i think using lot of ad codes also slow the blog performance.
The W3 Cache Plugin really helped me. Thanks for the recommendation!
Your site loads 19% faster than mine. I’m not ging to tweak it as I’m, working on a new theme anyway. :)
You mention premium themes as opposed to free ones. What do you think about the basic wordpress theme – Twenty Ten?
If I decide to use the W3 Total Cache or WPSmush.it plugins, where do I load them on the blog? Are they visible to blog viewers, or do they run behind the scenes?
Thanks for the hepful post. I am confused about one thing, though. What do you mean about using images instead of buttons? Aren’t the buttons images? Or do you mean hosting the images on your own site?
I had a plug-in on my site WP-dashboard and it slowed my load time considerably. Noticed it immediately, even for backpage stuff like logging in was a nightmare. Took it off and now it;s back to normal speed! Those plug-ins make a HUGE difference!
The W3 Total Cache is not working/can not be activated in my WordPress :(
(Newest Version)
Any suggestions?