How To Speed Up Your Blog And Reduce Load Time

I said in one post that Google takes the blog’s speed into consideration when ranking a blog and that is the reason why it’s important to work on your blog’s speed.

Based on research 60% of your readers expect your website or blog to load within 2-3 seconds, anything higher than that could make you lose more than 45% of your readers.

Talking about this, I hope you have experienced this before when you visit a blog and it takes more than 3 seconds to load you decide to exit or leave the blog.

In order to speed up your blog, you need to follow intensive and practical methods which I have planned for you.

Mentioned below is a list of the best ways to speed up your blog and reduce load time

1. Optimize your blog’s image

When we upload the image to our blog we forgot that the image is liable to increase your blog’s weight and therefore increasing the blog’s loading time, decreasing the blog’s speed.

You can optimize your blog’s image by using apps or software. Sometimes you can use an online image compressor.

All you have to care about is that you mustn’t lose your image’s quality during compression, doing that may cause harm to your blog’s conversion rate.

WordPress user has the opportunity to automatically optimize their blog’s image:

You can optimize the size of the image using Smush it plugin. The plugin is offered by the smush team and it helps to decrease Image’s weight without losing its quality.

You can use another WordPress plugin named Lazy load, this will help you load images as the reader scrolls to the bottom of the page this will load the image one after the other.

This way your blog readers will enjoy visiting your blog which loads faster.

2. Minify your code

Minifying your Javascript/CSS codes helps you save your blog’s loading time.

You can check if your blog has more codes by examining your blog’s speed using the blog’s speed checker such as Pingdom, Google Page Insight, Neilpatel Seo Analyzer, and Gtmetrix.

This will show how fast your blog loads and also show you how to solve some issues with your blog’s speed.

There are some of the codes that are not needed on your blog, you can save your blog’s loading time by removing them.

You should avoid flashy widgets or plugins.

It does speed up blog loading time, you should try as much as possible to remove some unwanted CSS codes.

You can use another plugin meant for WordPress users called Autoptimize to compress your blog’s HTML and CSS elements.

There is also an online tool that can be used for minifying HTML and CSS codes, this online tool is applicable to all platforms be it Blogger or WordPress.

3. Decrease the number of post on your homepage

You can see right on some blog’s homepage that they don’t have more than 5 posts displayed on the homepage.

The normal range of displayed posts on the homepage should not be more than 5-6.

Having posts more than 6 will definitely slow down your blog speed.

When you reduce the number of posts on your blog’s homepage, it will speed up your blog, thereby making your blog load faster.

For WordPress users, you should go to Settings >> Reading in your WordPress panel and you will be able to set your choice of post number.

4. Decrease the use of many advertisements

Nowadays we bloggers believe in the use of ads to get our income from our blogs,

it’s true that these ads habit help us earn money but too much of it decreases our blog’s speed and value.

What I mean by that is just the basic rules of the word, when we overdo something at a time we become too far from normal when your blog has so many adverts implemented on it,

it loses value, nobody would want to visit a blog with too many adverts.

That is not all, using too many adverts also slows down your blog’s speed and

therefore you begin to lose visitors thereby losing your revenue and reducing your income.

The solution to this is to for you to add or insert adverts where you see it necessary,

add adverts only to place that the ads will be seen by your visitor without adding more than 5 ads to your blog.

Use less banner and optimized images. If you’re using Google Adsense you could use Google Adsense’s tool by using your ads in asynchronous format, therefore,

It will load adverts when your blog is done loading, increasing the blog’s speed, and getting your adverts seen by users who will enjoy your blog’s loading speed.

5. Use a better hosting service company

This applies to you if you’re a premium blogger, you should watch and learn before using or choosing a hosting service provider.

Check out for their requirements, see the ones who fit right in to your needs and

then make inquiries about their loading and online time.

Make sure you use hosting services that are well known, trusted, and most used by top bloggers.

Website hosting service providers such as Bluehost, and Hostgator are said to be more trusted and tested.

They have live chat support for complaints, they are cheap and faster.

Make sure to try as much as possible in taking time to review the hosting plan you’re going for, to avoid some circumstances or any problems in the future.

6. Get a better theme for your blog

The theme is also important when deciding on making your blog load faster.

You have to work really hard on your theme. If you really want visitors to stay on your blog then it’s a must to get the best theme.

A good theme is the foundation of site usability, apart from being the backbone of the look.

When choosing your theme you should consider using themes that are well designed,

well structured, high SEO meta, good meta tag, fast loading, well coded, secure, and SEO-Optimized.

7. Use a caching plugin for your blog

This applies to you if you’re a WordPress user, you should consider using a caching plugin

if you want to decrease your blog loading time and speed up your blog entirely.

I recommend you use W3 total cache. The plugin is the best of them all.

Now that you have the tips for increasing your blog’s speed, you should try to check out your blog’s speed when you are done working on the blog’s speed.

You should use a blog SEO checker to monitor your blog’s SEO, speed, and health entirely.

8. Go for a CDN

Based on my research I learn that a slow site can speed up with a CDN, with the intervention of a CDN it is guaranteed that your site’s speed will increase by 50% or more.

Using a CDN like Cloudflare help serve your site visitors whenever they visit the nearest data center and this increases how your site reacts to the server with the help of CDN.

CDN actually requires you to get set for a little budget aside from your hosting fee, yet there is a site that provides it for free.

Learn about the site that provides free CDN to speed up your blog loading time

9. Make use of the Lazyload option

Using the lazyload effect is useful, It makes Images, Javascript load only when the visitor scrolls to see them.

This reduces excess loading time and bandwidth usage when you start to

lazyload your site Image you will experience real changes in the site speed.

Lazyloading Iframe help reduces server response for quicker load time,

For example, Instead of showing the youtube video directly to users, you can use the preview option to show the cover and then the real video when the user clicks to watch.

10. Use Gzip Compression 

This option not only speeds up your blog load time but at the same time reduces the size of your webpage by 75-85% and that is a real speed deal.

Compressing your site speed with Gzip will make the browser connect faster than before.

Lots of hosting companies provide those features if you don’t have the option installed you can use a plugin

Gzip, the plugin will compress your site.

11. Have your WordPress version upgraded

One of the ways to have a pretty optimized and fast site is to update your site WordPress to the latest version always.

This saves you lots of things such as security, speed, higher performance, and others.

When you upgrade regularly you will have the latest features installed and the plugin is well-coded to avoid any bloat.

12. Block Spam Comments

Spam comments always have their way into your blog and this drags your blog speed. Lots of comments with backlinks can slow your site.

There are spammers everywhere even on the internet, I am always having this experience day by day.

The only way to avoid the drag down in speed is to curb the behavior of irrelevant comments by using a spam comments blocker.

If you make use of a spam comment blocker you will surely speed up your blog.

This will save you bandwidth money, speed up your site, and save you from unnecessary headaches.

A plugin called Akismet can do the trick.

13. Optimize your site Database

The optimization of a database is one way to speed up your blog, the database does get bulky most of the time and it is known to help WordPress load its comments and other CMS options.

So in case, your site database gets bulky, then it affects the performance of your site, there are lots of plugins that do that database optimization easily.

14. Stop post revisions

Post revision occurs when you write a post/page or edit a post/page on your site then it gives back up in case you are unable to save, so you won’t lose your content.

This feature is good but if it becomes too much, it will eat up your site CPU the slow the site down.

You can limit the post revision feature with this code 

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 10);

Or stop the post revision feature completely with this code

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);

15. Remove and cache Gravatars

Removing gravatar can save your site some weight, these Gravatars are not so necessary.

Each comment you get on your site will create a gravatar, so it is helpful for you to turn off the gravatar and activate the blank.

But if it is really necessary for you, you can always cache the gravatar to make users’ browser load from the previously downloaded Gravatars thereby adding no additional load.

15. Disable Content leaching and Hot linking 

Most sites with lots of infographics experience a high surge in CPU usage and it’s not cool as you get to pay for the usage and also it will affect your site speed.

16. Always upgrade your site PHP version

As we all know WordPress is programmed to work on PHP, the latest version of PHP is always known to have been well optimized than the previous version.

For you to always keep your site running fast and efficiently, always make sure your site is running on the latest version of PHP.

By default, those top hosting companies always try to keep the PHP version up to date,

If you notice your site is working on an old version try to upgrade it through Cpanel but if you are not getting the option then contact your hosting support. 

With that, you’ll be able to speed up your blog in some important aspects.

Rounding Up

Now that you have learned how to speed up your blog, it’s time to take it into action and follow up progressively.

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