Increase Blog Speed Using These 10 Tips

In a digital world where millions of online bloggers are trying to make a name for themselves, blog speed is becoming increasingly important. To increase blog speed. is to please not only Google, but viewers as well.

People these days are very impatient and absolutely refuse to wait on slow blogs or other sites to load, so instead they will go to the next one. You have to separate yourself and give the people what they want if you want to be a top earning blogger.

Why Increasing Blog Speed Matters

Being Better Than Competitors:

An estimated 75% of users on the internet hit the back button and go to a competitor's site instead of waiting for a slow site to load. So by separating yourself from the competition and being much faster than them, you increase your traffic.

In other words, if your blog is slow, you could lose not only traffic and sales, but give your competitors more of an advantage over you.

User Experience:

People on the internet these days don't exactly have low expectations for sites in search results. They expect your blog to deliver great content, speed, easy navigation, etc. Don't let them down if you want to make some sales or build a top notch brand. In fact, if your site takes longer than 2 seconds to load, you could lose around 40% 0f your customers. Just remember, without people you have no sales, so make the people happy with your blog or website.

Organic Search Engine Rankings:

Since 2010, page load speed, as announced by Google, has been a very significant factor in getting your search engine rankings on the very coveted first page of results. When you are online and rely on a blog for sales and branding you better not just make the viewers happy, but make Google happy as well.

Since Google happens to be #1 in the world in traffic and is the largest search engine, just a few blog posts ranking on page one could change your bank account forever. Keep that in mind when optimizing your site for speed.

Adwords Quality Score:

Your Adwords Quality Score is what drives your PPC campaigns on Google and affects how well your ads do. Google gives quality credit to sites that are as fast as possible because they know those sites will convert much better than others.

Overall, boosting your Quality Score with more blog speed can  save you money in ad costs and get you more reach to increase traffic, as well as sales of course.

The Mobile User Impact:

Back in the day, before the take over of smart phone internet and apps, mobile users were a little more lenient when it came to loading speed. Now, as 3G, 4G and ridiculous wifi speeds have taken over the mobile internet, users are a lot more demanding of faster load speeds on their smartphones.

Chances are, a very large chunk of your web traffic is from mobile users, so to please them and convert more sales, make a lightweight mobile version of your blog to increase blog speed and keep readers happy.

Related: 6 Best Tools For Testing Website Performance

10 Quick Tips To Increase Blog Speed

Minimize HTTP Requests:

As outlined by Yahoo, as much as 80% of your blog or website's load time is from HTTP requests. The different components of these include images, flash, style sheets and scripts. To eliminate these from slowing your site down, just get rid of all unnecessary components of your site. The best sites are simple, fast and lightweight.

Upgrade Your Server:

If you have a slower site and are using a shared hosting server, upgrade it to a dedicated server or a VPS. This will give you more web server resources, allowing faster load times.

Optimize Your Images:

When it comes to using images on your blog, keep in mind the size and format of each image. Focus on keeping images as .png or .jpg for best results. Each image will tell you how many KB it is in size when you upload it. Keep this number down as much as possible to increase load speed.

I recommend using Yahoo Smush It  and Web Resizer to make image files smaller. Don't use .bmp or .tiff either when uploading photos to your blog.

Use A CDN (Content Delivery Network):

Host your files on a content delivery network if you want to further increase blog speed. Doing this could cut your site requests in half and even save you 60% bandwidth. If you want to do this, I recommend either Amazon CloudFront, MaxCDN, or CloudFlare.

Enable Browser Caching:

When someone lands on your blog for the first time, HTML documents, style sheets, images and JavasScript files are stored on their hard drive in a cache (temporary storage). Next time that person comes to your website, it loads it from a local cache instead of sending another HTTP request.

So, you definitely want to enable browser caching to give your repeat visitors the best experience possible.

Enable Gzip Compression:

Gzip is very useful because it minimizes bandwidth and speeds up your load time. If your pages or blog posts have pretty good content, chances are they are over 100 kb and it will slow the page load speed down.

To compress the components of your pages and save up to 70% of load time, make sure you have Gzip enabled by doing a Gzip Test.

Minify Your HTML, Javascript And CSS Files:

Sometimes when you build pages on your blog, junk code can be created and you need to get rid of it to increase blog speed. You need to minify these components to increase your blog's load time.

To minify them use the PageSpeed Insights Chrome extension for HTML, cssmin.js or YUI Compressor for CSS, and JSMin or Closure Complier for Javascript.

Put Scripts At The Bottom:

To increase your blog speed even more, it's a good idea to put your scripts as close to the bottom of your pages as possible. You also want to put your CSS at the top of your pages. You want to put script files at the bottom because your visitors wouldn't want to see a blank page while your browser loads your different script files.

Minimize Your Redirects:

While you may want to redirect people to a different URL for some purposes, you don't want to do that a lot. You need to minimize your site redirects or your load speed will suffer. The reason this slows your site down is because each redirect requires an HTTP request.

Testing And Tweaking:

Always be measuring your site's performance and tweaking things that may need to be fixed. You want to keep your blog as fast as possible so that you can make every visitor count.

Conclusion

If you want to turn your blog or any other website into a big brand or income producing machine, you better make sure you please visitors and search engines by using these tips to increase blog speed dramatically. Speed and quality content can get you very far in today's digital world.