by Diane
Speed up your Blog!
December 2, 2008 in Blog Tools by Diane
In a time where we live on information overload and with the changes that Google has brought forward about slow websites, it is becoming increasingly important for bloggers to check their site loading time, especially anyone making an income from their blogs.
While it may seem obvious what having a site load slowly can create here are a few obvious reasons to read about site loading time:
1. When your site loads to slowly, your readers will get frustrated. Frustrated readers will not stick around very long and in fact will just move on to a faster loading blog to get their information.
2. Do you want people to link to you? The reality in todays world is that people need and want to link to sites that are reliable and that are fast. If your site does not load fast, people will say thanks but no thanks to linking with you!
3. How many of you want to advertise on your blog? Here is a fact for you, advertisers need to know that they are getting their money’s worth. If you site loads slow, why would they want to place anything with you, nevermind advertising?
Maybe the most important point about having a slow loading site is this.. Google is looking how fast your site is loading and will penalize you if your site goes down too often or if your blog loads too slowly and it is not unheard of for Google to have you removed from their search index ( one heck of a penalty!)
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 
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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