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People have very short attention spans in this digital age. If they don’t find what they want in a few seconds they will click away. There are just so many things fighting for our attention that it doesn’t take much for us to say “never mind”and go looking for something else.

Your site should load in less than 5 seconds and definitely no more than 8. Your site speed also affects your Google search rankings

Testing Your Site Speed

You can test your site speed using a few different tools. They are all slightly different. I suggest trying each one out and using the results of them all combined to determine if your site speed needs improvement.

• My Site Speed – simple results but doesn’t help you figure out what to fix.
• Website Speed Test – can test up to 10 sites at one time, basic results
• Web Page Analyzer – more in-depth and gives feedback on specific images/areas
• Pingdom – in-depth but complicated
• Stop Watch – stopwatch at the top of the page

I Have My Results, Now What?

If the tests say that your website is running at optimal speed (8 seconds or less at least, 5 seconds or less is best) then you will still want to read on to find out how to increase site speed so you can ensure your site stays at an optimal speed.

If the tests say your site is too slow, then read on to see all the ways your site can get slowed down. Pick the one you think might be causing the most problems for you and start with that. After you make a chance or two, retest to see if there was an improvement.

How to Increase Site Speed

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On Any Blogging Platform

1. Crop your images to the size you want BEFORE uploading them. Don’t upload it huge and then resize it.
2. Compress your images before using as well. Picmonkey.com or ipiccy.com are free.
3. Stay away from animated graphics, unnecessary JavaScript, background sound and nested tables.
4. Using CSS instead of HTML will make your site load faster.

On Blogger

There is not much you can do other than the above to increase blogger blog’s speed. But there are a few.

1. Display less posts on the main page. Definitely less than 10, perhaps even 6 or 7.
2. If you add custom CSS, it should go at the top of your page.
3. Third party JavaScript should go at the end of your page

On WordPress

There are a few things you can do with a WP blog to speed up the load time.

The more “stuff” on your blog, the longer it takes to load. Themes, plugins, comments, post revisions etc. Clean your database regularly to increase site speed. Every time you make a change to a post and it auto saves, it creates a separate post revision. All these add up and take up room.

1. Delete deactivated themes/plugins. They take up room and are also a security risk.
2. Evaluate the rest of your plugins to see if you need them all. One plugin that does two jobs is better than two separate plugins.
3. Use the P3 plugin to evaluate your plugins’ functionality. More Here: Plugin Performance Profiler
4. Don’t schedule backups to your server. Or if you do, remove all but the most current.
5. Use a Cache plugin which shows saved version of your webpage to visitors instead of fully loading the page every time. Use WP Super Cache OR W3 Total Cache
6. To get rid of those post revisions, auto draft posts, and spam comments, use WP Clean Up or WP Optimize

These ideas should get you started so you can get your site loading quickly.

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