Top 10 Ways to Reduce Your Website or Blog Load Time

Abrar Mohi Shafee December 6, 2013 No Comments

Loading time of a website or blog is evolved with static user experience. It is a very important factor nowadays, especially in Google’s eye. Now Google is more concerned about ranking the websites providing better user experiences.
For instance, it will be really annoying to wait 5-10 second for a single page to load. The increased load time can increase the bounce rate. That wouldn’t look good in Google’s eye, no even for users. As a result, it can lose you both traffic and search ranking.
This is the reason why you need to reduce load time and serve blazing fast web pages. The question you would probably ask me “How to do this?”. This post is with the same intention. I will guide you through how to lead an unusually fast site in just 10 steps.

At first check your current page speed:

You can do it by yourself in no time. Just visit your site while peeking upon your clock. You will come to realize, how fast or slow the loading is. Though that will be often inaccurate.
So all you have to do is, go to GTmetrix, input your website and hit the go button. You will get a detailed report of your site speed, pointing out the areas you need to improve. Additionally, it shows you YSlow result, which is another useful tool powered by Yahoo.
An unoptimized page will get max B or C grade, that means the speed will be around 50%-60%. Though after optimization, you can expect to have it around 90%-100%, the A+ grade.
Can’t believe it? You will believe it right after seeing my outcome:

Many tools are available online where you can analyze page speed. Though the following two are my other recommendations:

• Google Page Speed Insights
• Pingdom Website Speed Test

How to reduce blog or website load time

#1. Choose the best hosting provider

Site speed mostly depends upon the hosting company. By getting high server response, the load time will significantly increase. Therefore, you need to make sure, you’re on a better host with minimum server response time. If you need company suggestions, I would boldly say to go with HostGator or WPEngine.

#2. Use cache to serve pages

By using cache, the browsers will keep a downloaded version of visited pages. When a person will revisit it before cache expiry, the browser will serve the saved one instead of loading a new session.
The main benefit is, cache will naturally decrease page and server load. Especially in cms platforms like WordPress, it works like a charm.

#3. Minify javascript and css files

Minifying javascript and css files mean assembling all js and css contents into one js and one css file. Several js and css files will increase the number of requests. Greater requests mean longer loading time. That’s why minify them for a stunning performance.

#4. Compress html

HTML compression will reduce the size of html pages. It will remove unnecessary codes and trim white spaces. Search engine loves clean html page sources. Therefore, it will be helpful.

#5. Optimize images

Images will put great impact on page loads. Because they will need more bandwidths than anything else. However, if we give specific image width, reduce image size and put minimum amount of images on a single page, the impact will be low. In WordPress blogs, you can use Smush.it plugin to optimize them.

#6. Choosing perfect template

Template is the site’s backbone where the load also depends. Poor coding and structure will result in high page loading. So choose it wisely and check before selecting template either it is optimized or not.

#7. Use minimum ads

Ads like Google Adsense, Yahoo uses javascript. And it is true, javascripts can cause very slow page loading. If browser can’t execute a javascript file, the rest of page wouldn’t load. So, we should use minimum ads on a page, better to limit it between 1-3.

#8. Avoid flashes

Flash media has disadvantages in SEO as well as page load time. That’s why we should mostly avoid it to keep a good speed.

#9. Use minimum number of plugins and widgets in wordpress

If you are on WordPress, I will recommend you to use low amount of plugins and widgets. Removing unnecessary plugins and widgets is actually better.

#10. Limit single page contents

Try to limit your contents for per page. Excessive content on a page will require extra bandwidth. So, try to limit the contents. If the content is quite large, divide it to two or three. In blogs, limit the number of posts in archives.