My Geekiest Ways to Increase Your Blog Speed In A Long Time

  Written by Easther Sudharta on Jan 29, 2012 6:40 am

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Did you know that your blog speed, how long it loads,  will influence your page rank. ?

It is Important to take your blog speed into consideration.

The other day, I received a comment telling me that my blog was really slow. That's not a good sign, for someone to actually commented on the speed of my blog. Because I know that Google looks into your blog speed performance, in its ranking algorithm, and so I don't want Google to penalize my site because of this. Although it makes sense for Google if they actually rewards sites that loads a lot more quicker than mine, so they can show more ads and make more money.

Based on a research, a page should not be longer than 3 seconds to load, any longer than this, visitor get frustrated and bored and will leave your page.
So I thought, I better start optimizing my blog.

On This post I like to share with you "My Geekiest Ways to Increase Your Blog Speed"

Step #1 Analyze What My Blog Speed is.

I first analyses my blog speed.  I wanted to know how slow is my blog and why.   I went on Google and search for a  tool to check the speed of my blog.  The search result came up with the following:

• Pingdom .  This is an easy tool to use, and its free,all you need to do is just enter your URL and it will examines all parts of  your web site.

• Page Speed Online  a tool from Google.    "provides webmasters and web developers with a simple and powerful online tool to perform Page Speed performance analysis with no installs". Page Speed Online is a much more of an Advance tool.

• YSlow. YSlow is  add-on which can be installed on Firefox. YSlow requires you  to install another add on called Fire Bug. This is an excellent tool to find out what actually makes your site slow.

• One of my Favorite tool is  WhichloadsFaster. This basically will check you blog loading speed against other blog.  All you need to do is basically enter your URL on one box and on the other box enter the ULR you want to compare with, easy! in comparing the two sites below, after I optimized my website , my site  against Probloggingsucces,  MyOnlineGameplan.com is 91% Faster :). My site against famous blogger.com I am the winner by 74%

 Step #2 Ways To Increase  You Blog Speed.

• Optimize images (automatically)

Having images on your post are great, it will make your blog more appealing.  However the disadvantages is that it will slow down your Blog Speed. It would load a lot more faster if you upload your image to Photo-bucket or a FileManager.  Optimizing my images means reducing the size of my images.

Of course optimizing your images is time consuming,  if you do them manually,  but luckily Yahoo has this plugin called  WP-SmushIt which dramatically reduces all the images automatically that are on your blog, and those images as you upload them and without noticeable quality loss.

I would recommend that you use an Image editor such as Pixlr or Paint to edit your image and save them onto some of the most popular extensions, such as JPG and PNG, not BMP, as a BMP image file is a huge file.

And If you going to upload a video, its better to upload them onto Vimeo or YouTube and use the embedded code into your blog

• Removing unused or Inactive Plugins or Widget.

Then I started removing all of my inactive plugins and widgets that I don't need. This was actually one of the easiest things that I can do to reduce my blog load time. Unless you really need all of your plugins, I would recommend that you only install the Must Have Plugins only.

• Optimizing Your Websites

Optimizing your website database can be a very difficult task to do for those who don't understand any technical terms, such as Cpanel, MySQL etc.  Luckily I've got the IT background :)

But for those who aren't very technical, the best way to do this is to install a WordPress Plugin called WP-Optimize.  Basically this will  optimize your website within a few click. Wp-Optimize " allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue, un-approved comments within few clicks"

As stated by the WP-Optimize developer.

"Everytime you save a new post or pages, WordPress creates a revision of that post or page. If you edit a post 6 times you might have 5 copy of that post as revisions. Imagine if your post or pages are long and big. It is a huge number of bytes thats on your MySQL overhead. Now WP-Optimize allows you to optimize and shrink your posts table by removing not necessary post revisions from the database. As example, if you have a post which is approximately 100KB data and you have 5 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 500KB. And if you have 100 posts similar to it, you have 50MB database space wasted"

and if you have WordPress, I would also recommend that you install W3 Total Cache (W3TC) plugin or WP Super Cache plugin. This plugin is great for 2 reasons.  One, it makes your page load faster, and two, it store static version, it requires less CPU processing than using WordPress all by itself.

• Minifying HTML and JavaScript

You probably wondering, what the heck does that mean? Sounds technical doesn't it?  Well according to  Wikipedia " Minification (also minimisation or minimization), in computer programming languages and especially JavaScript, is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code, without changing its functionality.These unnecessary characters usually include white space characters, new line characters, comments, and sometimes block delimiters, which are used to add readability to the code but are not required for it to execute"
Very Technical doesn't it. The Good thing is there's a plugin that does all the job, WP-Minify Plugin for Minifying HTML and JavaScript.

• Use a CDN  (Content Delivery Service)

CDN is another methodology to increase your Blog Speed.  As stated, CDN is basically a computer system that contains copy of data placed at various nodes of a network.

In other words its an optimized server around the world working together to distribute your content such as (text, graphics, URLs and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications, live streaming media, and database queries.  For Example, if you are living in Australia, for people living close to you, the load time is great, but what about those people who are accessing your site lets  say UK or USA the distances already ads seconds.

There is Free service CDN  called CloudFlare.  All you need to is to add your blogs to CDN on Cloudflare.com. Once you added your Blog to the CDN, you will then need to install the CloudFlare Plugin.There is a paid version called MAXCDN .  MAXCDN actually gives you 1 TB of usage for around $39.  That should actually last you for a bout a year.

Well there you have it, my ways of increasing my blog speed. If you have any other  ways  to increase your blog speed, please leave your comment with your suggestion below.

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