It is fairly common knowledge that Google uses the loading time of your blog as part of their ranking algorithm.
Although that is important…even more important is your visitors experience when they visit your site.
We want to read and see what you have to say…instantly…not in 30 seconds…20 seconds…10 seconds time.
We want to read it, watch it, digest it…NOW!
Over the last few weeks I have been studying and experimenting numerous different ways to improve this blog speed.
Some methods worked very well and some totally messed up my site.
But my current loading time has never been so fast!
In the next Blog Expert Series I am going to share with you the methods I found and implemented that did improve my loading time.
Just a warning…nothing I will be sharing with you will be too technical.
I know there are many people who change the insides of the theme WordPress code and all sorts of technical changes to help improve their loading time.
I’m not going to cover those. I’m going to cover the things all blog owners can simply implement without being overwhelmed.
At the end of the series if you follow all my guidance, I believe you can improve your blog speed by 50%. Obviously that depends upon the position you start from. Some of the ideas I will be sharing you may already have in place.
Oh…one more thing…I shall be taking this one step at a time. So some ideas will take you just a few minutes to implement others perhaps an hour or so.
See you next week with the first in the blog speed series.
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Andrew is a website builder and helps small businesses with their on-line presence…so they can grow their customer list and increase sales. That’s it! That’s what we do each and every day.
An hour or so for a non-technical tweak?
Yeah – I include non technical being adding a plugin and setting it up correctly.
Andrew
Thagt does remind me, have you been receiving my emails regarding the beta?
Is there anything else coming forth?
Hi Dennis,
No I have not received any emails from you regarding the beta (and I assume you mean our blog stats plugin).
There is more, better news…real soon!
Andrew
Great. I’ve sent a few with different updates, mostly everything is working OK…..assuming I have the latest and what not.
Dennis
I am expecting more news this week. One more final test and we will be able to provide an update.
Speak soon!
Andrew
Lookin’ forward, ready to jump on it!
I remember seeing some free tools to check your speed in the past – but I don’t recall where I left them ;^D
I’ve got several blogs, but one of them is a part of the Sacramento Bee newspaper program. It seems to me that the toolbar they use could be slowing things down a lot.
Julie
The first part of the new series will be showing a simple tool you can use to check your current blog speed and where some problems lie.
Andrews
Looking forward to the series. I took a look at the jpg reduction information and would love for this to be automatic. I found a Smuch.It plugin that reduces files as they are added to WordPress.
Steve
Smush.IT is a great plugin and I shall be covering it along with a few other plugins.
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
I am anxiously waiting for your article series about improving blog speed. I did not know that Blog Speed has any effect over Google ranking. I hope your article will be useful but please try to keep it simple so newbies can take advantage from it.
I am using Blogger Platform, please also give some suggestions about the speed improvements in Blogger.
Thanks
Nazam Warriach
I will make the series as simple as I can but I will only be covering the WordPress.Org platform.
Sorry.
Andrew
Page load time really matters and will count even harder in ranking the best proof of that is the fact that in your webmaster tools account you will find a Site Performance field ( under Labs ) .
If there is a message like (On average, pages in your site take 10 seconds to load . This is slower than 95% of sites ….. it means that your site has a problem .
I am looking forward to see your article because last month I did write myself 2 related articles that have over 500 visits daily …… for me that is a proof the the subject is HOT (A beginner 2 steps guide to speed up your WordPress blog and Advanced techniques that will make your wordpress blog fly ) . I will not put links to them (isn’t not fair ) because I am aware that Andrew will come up with something explained in a more simple manner and easier to follow .
So again i am looking forward to read your article .
After a time you will be forced to write another article for more advanced users because by simple methods like plugins ( minify , total cache ,…..you name it ) you will not manage to score better than a D or C in Yslow ( if you have a theme like the one on this blog ….with a lot of widgets ) . So you will have to push it a little further .
At the end if in pingdom you will have a time < 3 seconds and a Yslow grade of B ….you can consider that your blog is “fast enough”
Keep up the good work … I really like your articles .
Regards
SebyFwa
This first series will be aimed at the majority i.e. those that can improve their blog speed themselves.
Perhaps an advanced one is also needed for my more technical visitors.
Andrew
Looking forward to reading these.
I too have gone through this exercise and in the end, I personally concluded that what I really needed cost too much: VPS + CDN, or at least the VPS part.
According to Google, my load times are in the 2-3 second range and are sometimes much higher, which is bad.
I’ve tried all the Cache plugins and don’t really like them or trust them…though I won’t steal your series thunder here. I’m sure they work for many.
Ok, I’ve said too much.
Start writin’ bnuddy!
Rob,
What makes you say 2-3 seconds is bad?
I think that is pretty good!
Andrew
Yeah, that probably sounds unrealistic with all the WordPress sites on inexpensive hosted plans these days.
My “problem” is that before I jumped on the WP bandwagon, I designed static HTML/PHP sites and those sites will load a page in milliseconds, even on a cheap hosted plan. There’s no database to access or page to “build.”
Best I can tell, the only way to get that performance with a WP site is to pay up dearly for a VPS + CDN. I’ve seen WP sites using this setup and their speed is near instant. I.e., Pearsonified.
So while I know 2-3 second load times is “good” for a WordPress site on a standard shared server, it still seems painfully slow to me, based on where I came from.
That’s why.
Most of the delays are triggered by the JS functions called in the header . Even if you use minify …you will just remove some unwanted HTTP requests .
Moving all CSS on top and all JS on bottom , just before endind body-tag will result in a great improvement for human eye as well as for SE .
Even if in Pingdom the load time will be almost the same ….page will load faster for human eye and the SE will not count as supplementary time , the time needed to load all JS files / functions if those are “called” at the end .
Use Yslow or Page Speed for test …you will see great improvements from this small “advanced” trick .
Regards !
I already do that. That’s hardly “advanced” and results in little to no actual speed increase.
It does however, make the page load “correctly” for your users which makes paying attention to that worthwhile.
Rob,
I can understand what you mean.
I also build static HTML pages and yes they do load instantly.
BTW, CDN doesn’t seem to be that expensive.
Andrew
load time :
7 —– trouble
Hello fello Sitesketch101.com reader.
I will be looking forward to this series! something to check out, maybe you could use it for your post is the quick cache plug in, IMHO it is better than wt3 or whatever the letter combo is.
Hi John,
What makes quick cache better than wt3?
Andrew
If you are running on a VPS or dedicated best cache plugin is Super-cache .
On shared hosting Total Cache is the option . This is my opinion based on few hundreds WP deploys in last years
OK – thanks for coming back and sharing your experience.
Andrew
Who knows but it is. I did multiple bench mark tests comparing all the cache plugins..
and quick cache seemed to make the pages load the fastest…
try it for your self. and let me know what you come up with
John,
I shall try on another blog and see what happens.
Andrew
I so look forward to reading and implementing your techniques for improving blog speed. I have recently became kind of obsess with it after learning how big of a rule it could plays in everything from seo to attracting and keeping new visitors on your site for longer time.
Satrap
I do hope you learn something!
It is aimed at my visitors who don’t want to get into the technical side (too much).
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
I’m looking forward to your series on improving one’s blog speed.
Thanks!
It has taken some time for Google, at least, come out and say that they take loading speed into account. This is obviously because we’ve only just reached levels of worldwide access to FAST broadband connections, but also Google is encouraging people to create lightweight websites that offer a good user experience. Kudos to then I say!
Exactly – when Google speak…we all listen!
Andrew
I test with pingdom tools, my blogspot blogs are doing better then my domain blog. I don’t realize this until found your article about blog speed.
Thanks Andrew. I need to throw away some plugin.
Zezebel
I must admit I do like my plugins!
You have to be ruthless and get rid of some.
Andrew
Hello Andrew, I am looking forward to your blog speed series. For me, my loading blogs speed varies from day to day. Some days are faster than others…I do not know why this is.
Rondi,
My series has started – I hope you found the time to visit and implement some changes.
Andrew
I wonder to what extent Google does care about site speed. Obviously it’s a factor (and a good thing) but how does it compare to the size of a page i.e. if a page is really long does Google expect the page to take a while? I guess the trick is to keep pages reasonably short…
Matt,
Excellent question!
I think their alogorithm must take that into question…but we don;t know for certain!
Andrew