I’ve heard said that Google is now including the time it takes a page to load as part of  it’s algorithm when calculating a site’s PR. Too bad I don’t give a crap about what PR Google gives me, but I am concerned about those who come to read my blogs. That being the case I am always wary of the amount of plugins I install so before adding any new ones I first have to decide which one get’s the boot.

I also make sure that any images I include in headers and stuff are always optimized to save on loading time. Several of the plugins I used are also meant to increase the speed of this blog. They include.

• Clean Up: As WordPress auto saves your posts these extra files increases the size of your MSQL database and this plugin removes those extra files.
• WP-Cache: I used to use Super Cache but it was acting up so I reverted to this plugin which works very well. Basically it caches your files thereby improving the loading time of those sites using it.
• WP Minify: “This plugin helps you easily integrate the Minify engine into your WordPress blog. Once enabled, this plugin will combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time”
• WP Widget Cache: Used in conjunction with  WP-Cache this plugin caches the output of your blog widgets and is supposed to reduce the SQL queries to the database thereby speeding up the  site.

There are other things that can also speed up your blog and some of these were brought to my attention by Sheryl Loch of The Internet Marketers Guild, of which I am a member.  Her post, Speeding Up Your Site With YSlow, introduced me to a very useful FireFox plugin, a plugin that show you your blog’s speed as well as giving hints as to how to improve it.

I urge you to read that post as Brad, her husband, has very kindly taken upon himself to try to improve this blog’s speed. You may want to follow that conversation as it may well help you to improve the speed of your blog.

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