Some people can have sites that load really slowly and it’s a pretty good rule of thumb that if your blog takes longer than 5-10 seconds to load, people start getting fidgety and may even click away.

Here’s a tool that helps you check the load time of your site. It also has a “bookmarklet” you can drag to your links toolbar so you can test the loading time of ANY site you’re visiting. Here it is:

WebWait

Here are some of the timings for our different sites:

Success Health News

Average load time after 1 runs:

2.03s

BlogNet Awards

Average load time after 1 runs:

4.62s

Marketing Search News

Average load time after 1 runs:

4.68s

and of course our blog here

Success BlogNet

Average load time after 1 runs:

8.38s

Here are few tips to help your site load a bit faster.  Let us know how these work or if you have any other tips or tricks that work for you

1. Make sure pictures include height and width attributes. This allows your browser to immediately designate that specific amount of space for the picture which might, or might not, load right away. This frees the browser up to load things that come after.  There is also the suggestion that you decrease the size of your images or use thumbnails that link to the full-size image.
2. Place the most important widgets above the fold (the portion of the page visible without scrolling down) so people can get right to the good stuff.
3. Resist the temptation to fill every bit of space. Leaving some blank areas is easier on the eyes, and white space takes no time to load.
4. Avoid Long Pages! Besides taking a longer time to load, long pages are not well received by your visitors. It’s a better idea to split these long pages into shorter pages which improves the page load up time.
5. Keep Your Code Clean! If you do use a WYSIWYG editor, most of the time you will receive redundant code added to your pages for example, these empty tags <font> </font>. Removing these excess tags will speed up your load time.
6. Some blogs have music videos or other types of video clips that start playing when the blog is loaded. While these type of videos or audio clips might seem so fantastic to you, they are not going to do you any good if people leave your blog before it has finished loading Instead of having them load automatically, have the player available for people to click on if they should want to.
7. Take it easy on using Widgets, most of the widgets you will find, while they look so COOL, will actually make your blog load slower! How fast it loads depends on the site where it’s actually hosted. Whoever created the widget (script) is hosting it, and if their site is slow, it will only add time to your own page loading.

Now You Know

To Your Success,

Success BlogNet Team