Let’s face it, who likes waiting in line, on the phone, at a traffic light, for a blog page to load? I don’t see too many hands. It is okay to be kept waiting if you’re playing chess, but not reading blog posts.
Test your webpage load times and if they do not come down from your webhost in under 10 seconds then you have a problem. How serious? Read on…
Try this. Clear your browser cache of temporary files. Keep your cookies and browsing history, just clear out the temporary internet files (images, html, css, javascript, etc) that are stored by your browser. These are stored in your computer browser cache to speed up subsequent page load times as you visit other pages on the same site.
You may have been lulled into a false sense of security in thinking that your site loads quickly but it is probably because your browser cache has a copy of all your site files – and why wouldn’t it as you visit your site often enough!
Clear your cache now and grab something that measures seconds. If you are on a shared internet connection, check that no one else is using it for the next minute or two.
Ready? Enter your site URL into a browser window/tab but do not press Enter yet. Note the time (seconds) and then press Enter.
Stop the timer when the whole page has loaded. Do not stop the time until your browser activity indicator shows that the website page has been fully loaded. This will also be indicated with “Done” in the lower left status bar of IE and Firefox.
I got the shock of my life when I first did this. My home page load time was just under 30 seconds! Using just three simple techniques below I have got that down to around 14 13 seconds and dropping…
What time did you get?
Less than 10 seconds
Anything under 10 seconds is brilliant. Give yourself a big pat on the back for your choice of theme, images and content in general. Your webhost will also have played a big part in this, but more about that later.
Between 10 and 20 seconds
You at the early warning stage. If this time creeps up you might be in trouble. Now is the time to tweak a few settings. It is not yet time to panic and it will not be affecting traffic too severely, yet!
Between 20 and 30 seconds
You’re approaching a severe warning. It is important that you take urgent steps right now to get that load time back below 20 seconds, at least, within the next few days. Certainly by the end of this week.
Over 30 seconds
The red lights are flashing and the sirens are wailing. You may notice in your server logs that there is a high bounce rate (the number of people who leave your site from the same page they landed on). High bounce can often indicate slow load times as no one likes to be kept waiting.
What can you do?
First things first, go to http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ and submit your site URL for a bare-it-all webpage speed test. You will need to type in a capture style code that prevents bots abusing this service. This test will tell it like it is and lay out every little component it had to load in order to download your blog page. Use your home page URL as that is probably going to be the most visited page.
The report will take one to two minutes as the server is not just working on your site. It does return fairly accurate load times based on file size, the number of HTTP requests and other key factors, in its analysis.
One effective solution to a bogged blog is HTTP compression
One of the more advanced, but very effective, ways of speeding up the downloading of your blog is to set up what is called “HTTP compression, otherwise called content encoding using gzip”. It you have access to your website cPanel, you can turn on the Optimize Website icon in your cPanel. Once clicked, choose the tickbox to compress all content. If you do not have the Optimize Website icon in your cPanel then ask your hosting company if it can be added. Once added, activate it.
After you have activated this option, run your site through the website optimisation analyser and see what difference it makes to the download time.
If you have got it under 10 seconds based on a T1 (1.44Mb) link then congratulations – go write another great post. If not, study the website optimisation analyser report and see what can be tweaked to reduce the load times.
The most effective ways to reduce load time:
(1) Reduce the number of objects on the page (images are usually the main culprit), followed by image file size.
(2) Check for images larger than 10kb and see if they can be replaced with smaller files without losing image quality. This can be done in most image editors by reducing the quality setting to around 65%. Sherryl Perry wrote an informative post about the importance of using optimized images on your blog and it’s worth a few moments of your time to read her tips on this subject.
(3) HTTP Compression as noted above.
Let me know what results you got and if any of the above tips helped you to reduce the load time of your blog home page.
Related posts:
Twitter: alljessilicious
says:
Hey Michael – great tips here! Checking out the Web Page Analyzer right now…
I don’t think my blog is too slow loading, but I’m about to find out and will definitely use your tips if it is! 
Cheers!
Jess, thinking about your domain name is enough to keep people busy for a few extra seconds so you can afford to have a slightly slower site than most of us
Thanks For These Invaluable Tips Michael Keep Up The Good Work…
Cheers !
twitter.com/itihnQMedia
youtube.com/ithinQMedia
facebook.com/ithinQMedia
You’re welcome Brian.
Twitter: barry_wells
says:
Hi Michael, fantastic. This is an excellent guide and simple to apply.
I used to have a plugin for Bookmarking and Sharing and my blog was really slow to load, i’d watch the bottom left corner and see it saying “waiting for…..the name of the plugin owner”.
I then found one of your earlier posts about plugins and replaced the slow plugin and added a few more that you and some of your readers recommended. I noticed the improvement straight away, not only in speed of loading but also appearance and the amount of comments being left.
So with all of that in mind: I have just cleared my cache and taken the speed test………..9 seconds!
Boy oh boy am i impressed, thanks Michael.
Catch up soon, regards, Barry
Barry@The Newbies Guide´s last post..Keywords and Keyword Spamming On eBay
I killed off the sexy bookmarks plugin as the image that it loads was taking many seconds to come down the line. It is a massive image compared to most on the site and it could not easily be tampered with to make it smaller. Sexy bookmarks is cute but it truly will slow down page load times.
Well done on the sub-10 load times.
Twitter: anna_haller
says:
Michael,
Thanks for these great tips, definitely will be checking on my site with these tools as I’ve never even thought about this before.
Anna
Anna Haller´s last post..Outsourcing Interviews Revealed
Page load times can make or break a blog in the early days. Once you have a big reputation people might wait a bit longer as they want to read what you write. When you are getting known you cannot afford to p*ss people off with slow pages.
Hi Michael, thanks for these useful tips. I have checked my site and it loaded between 20 to 30 seconds. Probably the main cause is that I put in too many pictures in my topics. I think I will also use http compression if the load time of my blog is still not under 10 seconds. I really didn’t know that the number or size of pictures significantly affects loading time of a page. Thank you for sharing!
Felicia @ No deposit poker´s last post..World Cup Mob Betting – Final Weekly Leaderboard- 4 Matches Left
Felicia, it was the number and size of pics that was slowing my site. Optimising the pic size and taking a few out of the CSS scheme was enough to save 5 seconds.
good posting… i like this article
thanks for sharing.. bestregards
Karawang Business´s last post..Good Corporate Governance
You are most welcome.
Hey Michael, why is someone waiting at a traffic light for a page to load? lol
Good tips
Rose´s last post..Novelty gift ideas for her
LOL, yeah it is not the best grammar but you get the idea … no one likes to be kept waiting for anything. Thanks for visiting. I am off to find one of those chocolate items for my loved one
Great Post. I headed over to Website Optimization as you suggested feeling confident that my websites would not raise any flags. I quickly received a reality check as my home page ranked poorly. Looks like I have my work cut out for me trying to get my speed under control. Seeing as Google is penalizing slow loading web pages, I would say this is a priority.
Shirley Kelly@Lanterns 4 Less´s last post..Planning A Honeymoon on a Cruise
Hi Shirley and welcome to my blog. It gave me a real shock when I first tested my site. Since then with less images and smaller image file sizes I have got it down to a reasonable 11-13 seconds.
Thanks for the tips I will have to try them out. one big one when i go to blogs it take the stupid music of your blog. Most of the time it is horrid music and it takes for ever for the pages to load because of it.
Ryan, Thanks for dropping in. I promise to never host music on any site I own
Certainly not the auto-starting type anyway. I might have it as a backing track on an uploaded video but you will always have total control over the play/pause/stop buttons.
Twitter: barry_wells
says:
Hi Michael, i just thought i’d pop over and let you know that a few of us have got together and have started a 100 blog comment challenge.
The aim is to get as many people as possible taking part and get everyone commenting on each others blogs, sending tweets and bookmarking each others sites.
I’ve created my blog for the challenge. I can’t leave a link here as comment luv has cached for 50 minutes, it’s been doing it all day today.
Also you asked about the SEO plugin the other day. I have since looked at the stats and i had about a 25% increase in traffic. Which i think is very impressive for one added plugin. Sorry i didn’t have the answer the other day, to much going on off line.
Take care Michael, catch up soon, Barry
PS. If you want to take part in the challenge let me know and i’ll add your details to my contributors page and try and pass some traffic your way.
I’d love to participate Barry. Thanks for the invite. I will read more about it later in the day and get started on the commenting, tweeting and bookmarking.
Great article. It’s amazing how so few people realize how important page speed is. Especially to Google! If you use WordPress there a couple really good caching plugins that will greatly speed up your WP load times. Def recommend checking them out.
Hi Scott, yes there are many plugins that supplement native WordPress functionality and many that add amazing flexibility and power to the underlying code. It is necessary to be aware of those that add functionality but create negative effects elsewhere. I found that sexy bookmarks feel into that category with the very large, stitched-together image that contains every one of the icons you see in the control panel, in both its resting state and mouse-over state. This image is massive in terms of page load speed and represents a huge negative if you are struggling to get page load speeds down to single digit figures.
Thanks for this tips. I never take this problem seriously before. I thought slow loading is just because of problem in internet connection . I will use these tools to checks my own sites. Excellent read.
It can be a slow connection causing you some of the apparent slow loading times but it is more often than not due to the number and/or size of elements on the page. Every blogger should check his/her blog once every few months and any time a change is made to the theme or plugins.
Twitter: Craig_Sowerby
says:
Hi Michael,
I did as you recommended to see the speed of my site. It is really a bit out of my depth. I don’t suppose you have any training on how to use the website optimizer?
Cheers
Craig
Craig´s last post..Contributors Needed For Up And Coming JV Giveaways
Craig, I checked you site report using the tool mentioned in the post. There are a few areas where you could improve loading speed but a big improvement would probably be noticed if you trimmed the image you put into the Aug 1 post about building a website. It is >100 kilobytes. If you have a graphic editing program attempt to reduce the size of this file to less than 20kbytes. It should trim a few seconds off your page load speed.
The 2nd biggest gain you can make is to compress your webpage. Do this from within cPanel just like mentioned above. If you have cPanel access, take a look to see if you have the icon to “Optimize Website”.
Just these two actions will give a significant boost to you page loading speed.
Michael.
Twitter: Craig_Sowerby
says:
Cheers Michael,
I will get onto it and have a super dooper fast site. ( I hope???) Ondelay Ondelay!!!!!!
Craig´s last post..Put Your Email Marketing On Auto Pilot By Using An Auto responder
Anything you do to tweak your site will be welcomed by your visitors.
I wish everybody out there with a blog would read this. Some of the blogs are so slow to load that I give up. Others seem to have loaded and will still kind of jump around. I don’t know how else to describe it but I’m reading and the blog is just jumping around.
Gwenrule62lady gaga accessories´s last post..Lady Gaga Accessories Lady Gaga Costumes
I like to regularly check my site to make sure it is loading quickly and without quirky experiences. When I visit a friends place I will often ask if I can pop on their computer and look something up. I will then visit my site and check that it works on their browser and that it loads quickly. There’s nothing like a reality check to keep it all in perspective.
The response time is something that a webmaster should take care about very carefuly.
Spanish Lessons´s last post..Spanish Lessons – Sí- pienso ir
The response time is something that a webmaster should take care about very carefuly. Thanks
Great technique from you! Your point is really logical especially if your browser is automatically saving all your searches from time to time. If I’m not mistaken, Google Chrome has that feature of not saving your online activities, new incognito window I think.
ColeStan@Gift Ideas´s last post..Be Thoughtful And Give Unique Personalized Wedding Gifts
I think you can set that on most browsers – to not keep local copies of web site files, but it would probably affect your browsing experience to the extent that you would not leave it turned off for long before reactivating it.
HTTP Compression is quite impressing! Before, I’m not clearing my caches and history so it is really slow in loading for about 20 seconds. Mozilla firefox have lots of add-ons that provide tools for enhancement but it took time to load. However it has a saving feature when you immediately close this browser. Cool tips from you.
I find a good cache clean out helps from time to time but by far the simplest and most effective way for a webmaster to speed up loading of his/her site is the http compression setting in cpanel. You just can’t beat it
. Thanks for your comment Clinton.
Twitter: lionslinger
says:
At first, I did not know that loading speed is a critical factor until it have made know to me that Google’s rank factor include a website’s loading speed. From this information I have tried to remove unnecessary plugins and remove much of the images on my site. It does a good work in speeding up my blog.
Slow loading can sting you in two ways. First you get dropped by Google to a lower rank and end up on page 3 or somewhere nobody looks. Second, if someone does find your site (not yours specifically) then slow loading is sure to motivate them to click the back button or close that tab and move on to other search results.
From what I have seen around, large or uncompressed images are one of the biggest causes of site slow-downs. Followed closely by pages that contain elements from a dozen or more other sites (for example: analytics, trackers, ad servers, facebook plugins, twitter feeds, etc). These things are okay, just not too many on the one page!
Twitter: johnmcnally54gmail.com
says:
Great information Michael, and thanks for those 3 tips at the end.
I have been worried about my blog loading time, and was worried I had a false impression from my own computer due to temporary files being held in the cache.
I have gone to the optimizer site and have a loading time of between 13 and 50 seconds, depending upon the internet connection. I shall now follow your 3 tips to see if I can reduce this.
John
John McNally´s last post..5 Ways to Schedule Blog Posts
Hey John. Your page loads fine here. It gets an “A”, 91/100 from Firebug. That’s impressive. The main recommendation offered by Firebug is to activate GZIP on your site’s server (HTTP compression).
Thanks for dropping by. Michael
Twitter: johnmcnally54gmail.com
says:
91/100! I like it Michael, I’ve never been a 100% man. I was considering reducing my use of images, but I’d rather not, I think graphically. I shall look into the GZIP. Thanks for the tip.
John
John McNally´s last post..5 Ways to Schedule Blog Posts
Twitter: barry_wells
says:
Hi Michael, thanks for commenting on my blog.
Since carrying out the test above and leaving my comment I’ve been adding things to my blog: plugins and images to posts as well as the youtube videos i create, without much thought of bogging it down. Until now!!
I’ve noticed it getting slower so have been working on the add ons.
I’ve now deactivated some of the plugins and have removed some of the images to speed up my loading time. I think i’ve got it back to where it was (nearly) but wondered if you could carry out a speed test for me and share your thoughts please?
Thanks Michael,
R&R Barry
Barry@The Newbies Guide´s last post..My Top Five Essential WordPress Plugins
Hey Barry, according to Firebug (a Firefox plugin) your site gets a B grade and a rating of 85/100. That’s good but it could be better.
Let’s tackle one thing at a time. The first suggestion according to YSlow (part of the Firebug family) is to improve caching of mostly static content. This means images (jpg, gif, png), style files (css), script files (js), animations (flv, swf) and so on. Those files that don’t change much over time.
What will this do? It will speed up your web page load times for your regular visitors by caching those files that have not changed between visits. It is important to keep them happy as well as first time visitors. We’ll work on load times for first time visitors next. The speed report said that you have no cache time on many static files.
If you have edited the .htaccess file before then this will be easy. If not, proceed with caution. As always, make a backup copy of the current .htaccess file in the root of your domain. Use your fav FTP program to do this. If this next part causes your site to crash, upload your backup .htaccess file to restore it.
Edit .htaccess in the cPanel file manager and add the following after the last line of code. The # lines are comments, all the rest is active code. I like to put # around each entry in the .htaccess file so that it is clear what each section of code does.
# 2 week expiry on images, scripts and style files
<FilesMatch “\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$”>
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=1209600, public”
</FilesMatch>
# end 2 week expiry
Let me know how that goes for you and when you have it set up. I’ll take another look and give you another suggestion to do with image sizes.
Cheers, Michael
Twitter: barry_wells
says:
Thanks Michael, you’re a star.
I have followed your instructions and added:
# 2 week expiry on images, scripts and style files
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=1209600, public”
# end 2 week expiry
right at the end of the existing text. That was a little scary Michael, but i think i’ve done it all correctly. I also copied the existing text from within the .htaccess to a notepad doc as well as downloading the file before doing anything.
Fingers crossed that has solved the loading time.
Thanks again michael,
Respect and Regards, Barry
Barry@The Newbies Guide´s last post..My Top Five Essential WordPress Plugins
Twitter: barry_wells
says:
Me again Michael, just to confirm that the text i added was the same as you supplied. For some reason when i have pasted it here it has removed some of the text.
Thanks Michael,
Barry
Barry@The Newbies Guide´s last post..My Top Five Essential WordPress Plugins
No worries. The “<” sign tends to play tricks with anything that is HTML enabled, such as these WP comment boxes, and gets interpreted as the beginning of an element.
You have to put “<” in your comment to make the “<” sign appear as a normal less-than sign. So long as you got the text in my first comment altogether it should work.
You can change the 1209600 to be any time you desire. That represents the number of seconds in 2 weeks. Remember though, this only helps repeat visitors from having to re-load the static content. The next step is to speed up the load time for first time visitors.
To do that you will need an image editor with which you can adjust the size of your image files (ie compress them) while not perceptively affecting the viewing quality. When I did that on my background, header and other static images I saved more than 200kbytes of download for each of my new visitors, and shaved a few seconds off their load times.
Every little bit helps.
I use Fireworks (Adobe) which I bought as part of a CS3 package a while back. Do you have an image editor that offers you the option of reducing image file size while maintaining good quality visuals?
Twitter: barry_wells
says:
Hi Michael, I’m still using Photoshop 7 and not sure if it’ll do that, if it does I don’t know how. I had a look around it and couldn’t see anything offering reductions in file size.
Yes, every little does help. A couple of seconds off of each area soon tots up to a decent amount.
Cheers Michael, barry
Barry@The Newbies Guide´s last post..Blogging Tool for WP- Highlight- Comment- Share and Build Your Email List
I will take a look and see what I can come up with. What are you and your family doing for Christmas? Half mine have flown interstate to see other relatives so we will be getting the remaining few together for a quiet Christmas lunch I think.
Hi Barry, okay on with the show…
The quickest way to do this, I think, is to download GIMP – Google it – it is a free image editor.
Open a largish photo you use on your blog – something bigger than 20kbytes. Use the `Save as` option and be sure that JPEG is the file extension.
Adjust the quality of the image. Go to http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/gimp-images-out.html#file-jpeg-save and read up on it there.
I would suggest ticking the box that says `Show preview in image window` so that you see how low to adjust the quality while maintaining a reasonably good image on screen.
As you move the quality slider, let it go and it will show you an updated version of the file you are about to save in the main window.
You will be surprised how much this will trim off your images, especially the bigger photos. For example, the image I use on my future projects page, the young lady saying shhhh!, was 148kb to start with. I set quality to 50% and reduced the file to 13kb – a more than 90% saving in file size.
Use the web site optimizer page and take a look at the list of images on your home page. Pick one or two that are more than 20kb and see how much you can trim off them while maintaining a good appearance. Replace the current images with the optimized ones and you will improve page load speed for new visitors
Cheers, Michael.
Hi,
Excellent article, indeed, great tips mentioned! I also like to optimise my website’s loading speed too, now that the page speed became a very important SEO factor that cannot be missed but also a normal factor. No one likes to wait 5-10-15 seconds for a page to load, after the first 5 seconds, the visitors looses his interrest in visiting your page. Thank you very much for sharing this, valuable informations.
Best wishes,
Cristian
Cristian@Jocuri online´s last post..Jocuri 3d
finally i find this article..
my blog is to slow.. i try to take off that not usefull but it’s still slow..
thanks.. for share..
chaphunk´s last post..Pay Per Click Search Engines
Hmmm… Quite a nice and informative post to go through. Thanks for sharing these useful tips and advices that will be helpful for us in improving ourselves.
Thank you so much Michael for sharing this great web site analyzer tool.I thought my site’s loading speed is super fast but after checking in website analyzer and going through the steps you have mentioned,i discovered that my site is loading too slow.Now i come to know why i was not getting business leads becoause my enquiry form takes lot of time to load.The main reason for high bounce rate.Thank you so much.I have to contact my website developer now for getting the problem solved.Great website.I learned a lot here.You wrote a very helpful article.
Glad to be of assistance. I do hope your website developer does a good job on it.
hmmm…Thanks!!
I had a blog that would time out over and over and I finally decided that it was GoDaddy. I have a reseller account and the free hosting that came with it was less than to be desired. I could have a simple html webpage and it was fine but a WP blog was a nightmare.
I moved it to HostGator and it is wonderful.
So it never hurts to call the hosting company and ask them what is going on. If they have you on shared hosting with 1,000 other blogs all with dbs and you don’t know how popular you are that is a problem.
Selina
Selina @ Total Curve´s last post..Girls- Make It A Happy Spring With Total Curve
Hi Selina,
That happens a bit on cheaper or “included” hosting plans. Over 90% of all web sites get little or no traffic and hosting companies know this.
They scale it up and try to cram as many as they can onto the one server. That’s why they can often give hosting away as a bonus or sell it really cheap. They know it will cost them almost nothing for bandwidth.
I am glad you sorted it out. Page load times are a critical factor in site success. Once it goes over a magic number (around 10 seconds), many site visitors will move on and look elsewhere for answers/products/services.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Michael.
Great idea, I’m not sure however that your site tool is working properly. I entered my web address and everything came up zeros. I don’t think that’s possible unless their is a glitch somewhere.
Hmmm?? Just for the record, it is not my site tool, just one I found online. I just checked and it seems to be working. Maybe it was down for a while when you were trying it. Try it again sometime soon if you like.
This is so true. I’ve moved all my blog to a VPS and my load time is incredible now. I think my Google rankings increased too.
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Hi Nathalie, you’re right! Your site does load fast. Is the VPS cost-effective? How manys blogs do you run on it at the same time?
Hi Michael,
It is a very nice and informative post.Thanks for sharing the useful tips and web site analyzer tool.This post is very helpful for me.
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You’re welcome. I posted this short article in the hope that many would benefit from fast-loading pages – after tweaking their sites
Wow Michael, you’re genius. Your tips worked perfect. No wonder your blog is loading faster too. Your SEO rank will soon to rise with your tips. Thanks for being informative. This will really help all other aspiring bloggers to optimize their site and making it presentable, reliable, and hassle-free. Since time is really precious down to seconds, optimizing site loading time is crucial in attracting more readers. Goodluck.
Hey Fritz, sometimes the smallest of tweaks leads to the biggest of improvements. Every little bit helps.
Twitter: polanskimax
says:
Sweeet! My site loads in <10 seconds. But to tell you the truth, if a site took longer than 10 seconds to load most people would just back out or refresh. 10 seconds is A LOT of time in the internet world to just wait. People now-a-days are getting more restless. Just my experience on the subject…
Max @ Cheap Whiteboards´s last post..Black Magnetic Dry Erase Board
Page load speed is a massive consideration. My favourite optimisation tip is to optimise your website to the popular most resscreen resolution – e.g look at conversion rate your site by resolution size and compare this with visit numbers by screen resolution and optimise away!
Hi Michael,
It is a very nice and informative post.Thanks for sharing the tips and these tips are helpful for many bloggers.At this time my page speed is ok but may be in future I will need help by your tips.
waterpearls´s last post..ABCMouse Discount Coupon
You’re welcome. Glad to be of assistance.
Thanks for the tool and tips! I never would’ve thought of some of these things, time to optimize, optimize and optomize…and cut down some image file size.
Its embarrassing for me too because I regularly state in my blog that your loading time should be less than 10 seconds to ensure viewer enjoyment…and I went over it…curses!
Mike @ Mastery of the Internet´s last post..Review of MySurveycom
Hey Mike. Your background image is 65kb. See if you can get that down to 20kb or use a smaller file or just a plain colour. Every little tweak is going to improve load time and incrementally improve your readers experience. If you’re open to suggestions, it is better to have a dark coloured font on a light coloured background rather than white font on black. It’s easier to read. Try to avoid both being solid colours (eg black on white) rather, try a dark grey on a slightly off white. Experiment a little and ask a few friends what they think.
Wow, the testing site is very cool. I don’t understand all the stuff it serves you as feedback, but it makes you think. I don’t have a big site yet and in mind mind there couldn’t have been any problem at this point. However, it seems it’s not quite the case….
Alison
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Hi Alison, you site loads quickly. I like your simple yet effective choice of template. Good clean lines and some great content.
Hi Michael,
Great tips, I honestly never thought or checked my speed regularly.
But since I understand the importance of site speed, especially for the readers of our blog.
Mine loads under 9s and I hope that is fast enough, especially for the fellas who has slower internet speed than mine.
Thanks!
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Under 10 seconds is good enough for now. Well done.
I want to point out one thing that in my case was literally killing my VPS . I had one site with no more than 100 hits a day and i was getting mails from my hosting company that was telling i am at full memory load ! It turned out to be poorly coded WordPress plugin.
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There are some poorly coded ones and some that come with a gazillion images or one or two big images – any one of which will cause you grief one way or another.
A lot of websites get slowed down due to the template or theme in use. Sometimes the template are so loaded with unnecessary stuff that they can really cause a delay while loading a website.
There are also some sites that analysze page loading time and give a report on instances where the performance can be improved.
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Hi Amanda, thanks for your comment. Every little bit helps with page loading time. Google is only responding to changes in the social habits of its customers/users. The slower a page loads the more likely a person is to unconsciously consider the site an inappropriate choice for their search results. Google wants to delivery only high quality search results.
Thanks Michael for your great tips.I wanted to check my site, but I get “Your request returned no data.Please check your url and try again.” message. I tried it several times,but its the same…
Any idea?
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I’m not sure Tina. Maybe the site was down for a little while. What do you get when you try now?
Michael, this is exactly what I was looking for. I have a big authority site but not in english language, and I am all after speed for it, and like Amanda said, the theme does a lot of slowing down. Now even if I would like to change the theme I can’t because I would destroy all my websites permalinks and SEO structure. Currently I’m using WP Super Cache, but those are some good tips which I will apply and hopefully the site will load faster.
If there are any other plugins that could help up with the loading speed please drop a comment ! Thanks
Mike@Google Siphone Review´s last post..Google Siphon Review
Hi Ike,
I haven’t found any other plugins that help with page load speed although there are probably some out there. What I have found is that some will slow it down a lot.
There is a social book-marking plugin that loads a large composite image of every social book-marking icon out there and then uses CSS to display each individual icon on your posts. The image is >200Kb when I last checked. It was adding many seconds to my load time so I disabled it.
Check your speed report from the above exercise and it will show you which images are large. Identify which plugin/image is responsible. Large images can be reduced sometimes by re-saving them as a JPEG with a lower quality setting.
Let me know how you go. Michael.
This is just what I was looking for recently. We just started our blog and have read a lot about how load times can affect lead conversions. I’m going to put your suggestions to the test right now… Thanks again.
Vin, If it makes a difference to your load times, please report back with the improvements
Cheers, Michael
What a great compilation of tips. My site was a little over 25 seconds, as far as load time. With the sites that you suggested (and the tips) I got it down to a little under 9 seconds. Thanks a million!
Peter
Slow loading blog has always been a problem i have faced, thank you for the great post and the tips, i just did what you asked here and optimised the images too, the results are worth the effort, thank you so much !
I’m glad to have been of assistance
Great information Michael for those helpful tips
You are so right! A blog page that takes too long to load can sometimes annoy your visitors causing them to just exit your page. The simpler the better.
It not only annoys visitors who get fed up with waiting for slow pages to load, Google tends to get ticked off as well and drops your listing down the page a bit more each time.
Twitter: jeffry_evans
says:
If you are using WordPress, you can use a plugin called W3 Total Cache, which is easily configurable to cache your blog using http compression and other tools. You can also use a plugin called CS Sprites to combine image files on a page in to one CSS image automatically, causing far less http calls to pull in all of your images.
P.S. You have very good tips here as well. Http compression and reducing image file sizes are key to great page load speeds. The search engines want to rank pages that load fast, so it helps your SEO effort as well!!!
I was wondering how they do that with all the images combined into one fetch and CSS pulls out the individual ones. I will have to check that one out. Thanks Jeffry.
Hello there Michael,
Thank you for these wonderful information. I’m really happy that my blog doesn’t load that long, since it only load for about 15 sec. But when time will come that things happen like I will definitely know what to do.
Maria Cheska
Maria Cheska´s last post..Win lottery
You’re most welcome. Keeping it quick is the key to not annoying your visitors too much.