Top 10 Tips to Increase Blog Speed

1. Reduce size of page. My main blog used to be 37 entries. I checked and it was a massive 169K. This is too long so I reduced the size of the blog. I wonder how many visitors I lost because they didn’t want to wait the 10-15 seconds for the page to load. Also, if the page is too long it tends to overwhelm people.
2. Images take up the most space. So limit the number of images on a page. If there are too many images it can also be dazzling for the viewer. A good feature of wordpress is the ability to split the page. This means you can have long pages, but not everything on main home page. (There is also a hack for Bloggers to do this)
3. Reduce size of images as much as possible. Using adobe photoshop I always “save for web” and save images at a low quality. This means you can reduce the size of images, without much noticeable impact on the quality.
4. Check the site for 404s and 303 error messages. It means that the site is trying to load something unsuccessfully. Check stats or use Tamper Mozilla firefox download. More details on using Tamper can be found here
   
   
5. Be careful of having too many “widgets” on your site. A stat counter is definitely worth having, but if you have more than 1 and numerous other features you may be unnecessarily slowing the site down.
6. Choose the right blog software at the start. A former blog software I used was under development. Wordpress seems to be a good choice re: speed. Blogger is also quite fast to the view, although it can take a long time to publish things.
7. Minimise Fancy Scripts. Be wary of having fancy javascript and flash animation which can take a long time to load. Also avoid unnecessary scripts.
8. Use CSS rather than instyle html tags. It makes the page a lot lighter and saves duplicating save custom styles.
9. Stay clear of too many tables, especially nested tables. Tables are not really designed for webdesign they create alot of html which becomes slow. With CSS (and a good designer) you can create more fluid effects with much less code.
10. Have Enough Bandwidth. Check you have sufficient bandwidth from your server, its worth having more than you need incase of an unexpected spike. E.g. from Digg.

Also, as well as page load speed, another factor determining the speed of a site is – how easy is it to navigate? Do you create unnecessary choices?
For example, I always dislike it when sites have a gateway page, which says “click to enter” – What is the point of that? I can never understand.

So many times I don’t bother to “click to enter” – so the website has lost a potential viewer.

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