TechFlaps | Waves of Technology

The speed at which your blog loads is critical to attracting more readers to your blog. If your blog takes a long time to load, many readers may leave your blog before they have the chance to read it. No reader have the time to wait for a blog that takes more than 30 seconds to load. They will sure skip the blog and will go to other alternatives. So if you want to make your blog faster and more efficient, here are a few tips and tricks that will help your blog load faster and attract more users.

Set Number of Posts in Your Home Page : Your blog's load time can be affected by the number of posts you display on your main page. You can easily edit the number of posts displayed of the main page from the Settings Formatting tab. You can then select the number of posts you want to display on the main page. The recommended no of blogs to be displayed on your blog homepage is 10 or fewer.



Third Party JavaScript and Links : For optimal blog load speed, we recommend using Google/Blogger widgets, JavaScript and links. However, if you need to use third party JavaScript and links, your blog will load much faster if you put all JavaScript at the bottom of your blog. If you have third party JavaScript and links in your sidebar, put them in at the bottom of the sidebar.

Images and Media : The more images, videos and other multi-media you have on your blog the longer it will take to load. However, images and other multimedia are important to attracting users to your blog, so it is important to optimize the load speed of your images and media. Here are a few tips to increase the load speed of your media:

• Decrease the size of your images or use thumbnails that link to the full-size image.
  
• If you use third party images, consider uploading them to Picasa Web Albums via the Blogger post editor.
  
• If you have a large number of images to display, you can upload all your images (from a vacation or event) to a Picasa Web Album and link to the album in your post or sidebar.

Other suggestions

• If you've added any custom CSS to your blog, make sure you put it at the top of the page.


• The most important content of your blog that catches readers attention should load the quickest. To help you identify which items are taking the longest to load you can use Stopwatch.


• To use Stopwatch, enter your blog's URL into the text box and click "Start StopWatch". Stopwatch will then open your blog in a frame and will record the time it takes for everything on your blog to load, including images, videos, widgets, etc. Take note of the items that take the longest to load and modify them appropriately using these suggestions.

Apparently, all the steps suggested above are tried successfully in my blog and I have witnessed a significant change in the loading time for my blog. What it used to take 20-30 seconds to load the homepage is now taking an average of 12 seconds to load the whole page.