Alright, another post for my blogger friends. I am on a limited bandwidth host and not always but most of the time I run out of bandwidth every month. So I decided to slip down my blog loading time and have been working on that very seriously. And that is because of two reasons basically. One, I don’t want my readers to wait for ages to load a particular page. Second, I don’t want to end up paying extra money to my host for extra bandwidth. The motive behind this blog to put across my thoughts, which as per me do not need catchy images. By the way I am very fond of creating images and then adding them to the post. But somehow I now realized that its not good to have a blog/website which takes a lot of time to load. People just close the window if the website takes a fraction of second long. I just don’t want to miss that moment. I want more and more people to come on my blog and keep coming.

Anyways, here is how I did in terms of blog loading speed. I checked the speed of my blog on various website load test tools available on internet. I wanted to check if these test results actually measure the right speed or not so I did the test 5 times on each and every website. Then I came up with an average speed from one website and then average speed out of all the websites where I ran the speed test. Here are the results:

As you can clearly see some of the websites returned the same time for all of the speed tests I performed so you may wanna check those which returned different speed times. Just an FYI all the figures are in seconds. 3.29 seconds is a good time to load a blog I guess. What do you think ?

Now you must be wondering what did I do to make my blog so fast. Well there are things that I considered which I am going to list down below for you so that you can also optimize your blogs for your readers.

1. Choose the theme wisely. Its one of the most critical part for your blog. I know look and feel matters but speed too. Anyone would prefer a faster website compared to a sluggish website. Just imagine Google taking 1 minute to load. Would you go to Google for search every again. I bet you would not.
2. Use WordPress’ internal cache system. It definitely helps speed up your blog. If you use some other script then you can just Google it and I am sure you would find the relevant information.
3. Don’t use much images. If you blog occasionally then try to minimize the use of images in your post. If you really want to use the images then make sure you are using some image optimization scripts/plugins on your blog.
4. I am sure you have tried a lot of plugins and they would still be installed in your WordPress blogs and you are not really using them anymore. So just disable and delete the plugins that you are not using anymore. Also, try and minimize the usage of plugins as well. The more the plugin the more your blog will take time to load.
5. Use these plugins : Optimize Scripts, PHP Speedy, WP CSS, WP-Smush.it, WP DB-Cache and there are many more. Just search them.
6. I only display 5 posts on my blog’s home page which reduces the time of load. I have seen many people keep more than 20 posts on their blog’s home page which does nothing but increases load time.
7. Use excerpts properly. I know you are not used to it. But it adds professionalism. It keeps the intrigue in your posts. People should want to read more and more on your blog. Post unique and useful. If you are running out of ideas then you can check my post about ideas on what to blog.
8. Optimize your mysql database regularly. There are tutorials available to do the same but you can use WP-Optimize alternatively.
9. Use comment pagination if your blog receives heavy comments. The same cane be achieved by going to Settings >> Discussion in your WordPress dashboard.