Blogging Tip : Optimizing Page Load Time

While dropping my card on other sites, I had a chance to read their content, eyeing their cool display stuff, amazing photos and lots more. By doing so has improved my English as I'm able to pick up most frequently used words and new words. But one thing that caught my attention is the page load time. It's vital to know that fast loading pages improve the user experience. No doubt about it! This chart below shows the number of cards that were dropped on my blog each day.

(source: Entrecard)

(source: My Stats)

Like myself, I've started using AJAX techniques to reduce latency. This significantly decreases the amount of time between a user click and the browser finishing rendering the new content, thus ,you can read my entire blog without reloading the page ever.

I found few things to be interesting:-
a- Seeing so many sites having too many posts on the homepage.
b- Lots of big size photos.
c- Too many scripts/widgets from the third party hosted on their external server.

Below are few basic tips to reduce your page load time. These tips do not require any control over your web server, like being able to edit .htaccess or even the Apache server config.

a- Limit the number of post on homepage. If you want to display more posts, create expandable blog posts with links or add the more quicktag button.



b- Fat graphics are the leading cause of slow Web pages. Saving your images as PNG! PNG can often be compressed to 50% of it's original size without quality loss if you use the right software.

c- Before giving the browser any external object references (img src="http://www.blogger.com/..."), (link rel="stylesheet" href="...">), (script src="..."), etc, record the current time. After the page load is done, subtract the time you began, and include that time in the URL of an image you reference off of your server. Worst case scenario if the external server may not be reliable.

d- Last but not least, check your site performance or else you may also compare your site's performance. Visit Webslug to find out how quick your site is.