5 ways to speed up your blog

January 1, 2013 by
Filed under: Website Management 

No one likes to wait for a website to load so it’s important to ensure your blog is running at optimum speed. If your blog is slow it can set the wrong impression or even cause some visitors to navigate away from it, even if your blog contains some really interesting information.

There are many things you can do to speed up your blogs loading time and today I want to share my top 5 methods to increase your blogs speed.

1) Avoid using too many pictures

Pictures are downloaded to the visitors computer when they load your page which means having many HD pictures on your blog will increase the time required to load your page. Generally, a couple of pictures on a page will not cause any problems but you can still take measures to ensure the page loads even quicker. You can compress images, which loose a little bit of quality, so they are smaller in size. A popular file extension on the web is .JPEG and them files will mostly load quicker than a full HD bitmap file.

2) Take it easy with the plugins

Plugins can be very resource intensive and are a major cause of slow loading blogs. If you are a big fan of plugins it can be worth disabling the ones which are not crucial (or important) to your blog. All plugins require some form of resource on the web server and if your blog is filled with them it can slow it down considerably especially if you are on a shared server.

3) Host your blog in a location closer to your visitors

Your websites location can be fairly important. For example, if you mostly get visitors from Europe it may be worth getting hosting within Europe so your visitors can get faster loading speeds.

4) Use a WordPress caching plugin

WordPress caching plugins are mostly designed to optimize the performance and speed of your blog. There are many to choose from such as W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. A caching plugin could increase your blogs speed by a considerable amount and is often worth it if you are looking to reduce your loading time.

5) Delete spam comments often

Keeping thousands of spam comments in your database could impact your blogs speed. Regularly empty your trash and spam folder to ensure that the database is not carrying unneeded comments.

There are more methods you can use to speed up your website or blog. You could use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) such as Cloudflare or move to a different web hosting provider.

Got an idea to speed up blogs? Share it and let everyone know in the comments :)

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Comments

5 Comments on 5 ways to speed up your blog

  1. Reece on Tue, 1st Jan 2013 1:30 pm

    2. I like to use cloudflare on any website/blog I make. It’s truly a fantastic tool which not only speeds the site up but also increases security.

  2. Carl on Tue, 1st Jan 2013 6:03 pm

    3. Thank you for your comment Reece. Cloudflare is a wonderful CDN which is quite quickly gaining popularity. For any website it is most certainly something to look into :)

  3. luki on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 9:45 am

    4. Thanks for this post! I have applied some methods to my blogs (especially the WordPress caching) and I can really see a difference.

  4. bluz on Wed, 9th Jan 2013 1:49 pm

    5. Having a decent theme is good to. If you have a old theme which uses a lot of images/flash it can cause major slowdown (speaking from experience).

    Cheers for sharing your tips, I’ve put some to use ;)

  5. Ada P. on Sat, 26th Jan 2013 10:49 pm

    6. I totally agree with Reece. Cloudflare should be a more popular CDN for websites as it’s positives far outweighs the negatives, imo. i also have to agree with all the points in this post, they are some of the most basic, and best, ways to help get a little bit of extra speed in :)

    -Ada

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