Speeding Up Your Blog to Keep Visitors
Back in February I wrote a post about how to speed up your blog’s loading time. There have been studies upon studies done when it comes to web behavior and it has been proven that if a websites takes too long to load people will click the “back” button or simply surf on to another site.
As I mentioned back then it would be sad to have spent time and effort attracting a visitor only to see her leave your site because it took too long to load.
I’ve just monitored my site and it didn’t look good.
The result (in seconds) will depend on your webhost, the current traffic load on your server as well as the speed of your Internet connection. However you will still be able to measure improvements as long as you don’t change the connection from which you are testing as well as testing within a narrow timeframe (which will probably keep the server load at its current level).
So what I did back then was the following things (and I’ve just done them again). This little tool helped me monitor the time it took the site to load.
Deactivate useless plugins
I don’t know if I am the only one with this problem but as time goes by I manage to download and install a huge amount of “interesting” plugins for my blog. However when it comes down to it I’m not using all of them and could easily delete the ones that are not being used. Deleting unused plugins will help increase the time it takes for your blog to load.
Use a cache plugin
The second thing you should do is to use a plugin to cache your site for faster loading time. I recommend the plugin called WP Super Cache.
Clean up your CSS file
If you don’t know much about CSS then you’re in luck. This little CSS Cleanup tool will do the job for you. Be sure to make a backup copy of your original CSS file before changing anything (just in case).
Be aware of external widgets
Most blogs today use some kind of widgets/banners/badges or other tools for a number of reasons. Every time your blog has to load something from a different site it will slow it down. The best solution is to host as many widgets/pictures as possible on your own server to avoid slow loading or even downtime from external sources.
End URLs with forward slash “/”
Ending all your URLs with a forward slash can decrease the time it takes your website to load significantly. This applies to both in post links as well as any other links you have on your site.
Blog loading time increased by 38%
After going through the 5 steps above I’ve managed to decrease the time it took my blog to load with more than 38%. That is a significant improvement and unless you have tested your site recently I encourage you to test your site as well.
Fast loading websites will keep more visitors from moving on and that is a fact!
Speed up your site,
Mikael
P.S. If you enjoyed this post please subscribe to my RSS feed by clicking here.
If anybody want an alternative to WebWait check out: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
- It looks very pro..
I don’t think you did the test fair. The first one is the average load time after 1 run and the last one is over 5 runs.
But I do agree, that it all helps.
I think you are wrong about this:
“Ending all your URLs with a forward slash can increase the time it takes your website to load significantly. This applies to both in post links as well as any other links you have on your site.”
As far as I know, the opposite is actually true..!
When you have a if users and search engines try to access http://www.eeepc.dk/guides the server actually looks for a file with the filename “guides”. Since this is not found, it then carries on to look for a directory called “guides/”. Bingo, that was it.
So the better choice is to use http://www.eeepc.dk/guides/ since you (Apache) server then knows, that it should head directly for the directory and don’t try to serve a file first..
@ Denni, oh… you’re right about that. I hadn’t noticed. Well its hard to test now
@ Christian, you’re totally correct. It should have said “decrease” and not “increase”. It has been corrected. Thanks.
I just tried with my own site – and the first test was 6 seconds but the average was 2.9x or something like that.
Let us know what will happen after you clean up the site (if needed).
Well, I could add the Super Cache plugin, however I don’t think its needed.