The speed of your website and blog are very important. Here are 5 tips for speeding up your blog

1. 5 WAYS TO
YOUR BLOG
Ian Cleary
@iancleary
www.razorsocial.com

2. Did you know that Google doesn’t like pages
that are slow to load?
If your website is slow on a desktop, what is
it like on a mobile device?

3. It’s really important to have a website that
loads quite quickly.
As well as visitors not having much patience Google
penalizes pages on websites that don’t load quick
enough.

4. 1. A content delivery network
If you are running a global service you may have visitors
coming to your site around the world.
Depending on where your visitor is browsing from and
where the website is located the speed could be slow or
quick.
To optimize for visitors in different locations you can set
up your website on a content delivery network.

5. This means that your website is actually residing in
multiple locations.
When a website visitor comes to your site, the website is
loaded from the nearest location to them.
Website content is kept in sync automatically in multiple
locations so visitors will always get the latest copy.

6. 2. Pay more to your hosting provider!
When you sign up to a company that will host your
website you need to consider what they offer as part of
the hosting.
Bandwidth available – Imagine water flowing down a
pipe. If the pipe is bigger more water will flow down it.
If other people are pouring water down the pipe then
you’re in competition for space!
So get lots of bandwidth and make it guaranteed and not
shared with anyone else.

7. Guaranteed Up time – Your content is not going to load
very quick if your servers are down!
You need a reliable provider that will guarantee the
servers will be up at least 99.99% of the time!
Your own server or shared? - Your blog could be hosted
on your own server or shared with other blogs.
Ideally you want your own dedicated servers!

8. 3. Optimize your image sizes
If the image sizes on your website are too large it can
take too long to download a page.
Check out website optimization tool which does an
analysis of pages on your website so you can see which
pages have large sizes.
A lot of the times you can find the culprit image that is
too big and then you can resize.

9. This tool will show you the largest images on your page.

10. If you have a small image displayed on your blog it could
be really high quality so the size is large.
But because it’s small you may not need the quality to be
as good as most people will not notice the difference.

11. The following shows 2 images. One is 24kb in size and
one is 200kb. Can you detect which is which?
If you enlarge the images you would know.
One image is 24kb and the other is 200kb!

12. Consider also the formats of images for your website.
Depending on the quality you require for your image and
the type of image then different formats use different
compression techniques.

13. 4. Use Caching Software
Caching is like McDonalds having a load of cheeseburgers
ready that are exactly the same.
Other people have ordered the exact same so by having
them already made you will be more efficient!
When you are on a website and download a page this
page has to be constructed.
A request is made to the database to retrieve this page
and build it.

14. But if you request this page again or somebody else is
requesting the exact same page, it makes more sense to
use the copy that was already generated unless it was
changed since then.
Caching can make a huge difference to performance of
your website.
On this site we use a plugin called W3 Total Cache.

15. 5. Do a regular tidy up!
If you optimize your blog to improve performance, you’ll
need to revisit it again in a couple of months time.
This is a WordPress blog and this morning I removed 850
revisions of old posts that were stored in the database
and also removed some plugins that I no longer use.
So, a regular review and tidy up is required.

16. www.razorsocial.com