Taking the time to increase your blog’s speed is important. I spent most of yesterday working on the insides of this blog. You could almost call it Spring cleaning, being Spring and all. The reason behind it all was that I wanted to speed this baby up a little as it was starting to drag its sorry little ass and we can’t have that now can we?
I’ve read around the traps that the loading speed of any given website is critical because search engines such as Google will penalize slow-moving sites. Truth be told though there is something so much more important than the search engines and that’s your visitors. If your site takes too long to load you’re going to piss your visitors off and they’re going to leave without ever seeing what it is you have to offer. So anyway, here’s what I did to improve the loading speed of this blog.
Making Your Blog Load Faster

You make this a regular part of your blog maintenance because even though you’ve done it before chances are that over time you’ve gotten slack or added things to your blog that ultimately slowed it down. I reckon that making it part of your spring cleaning routine would be a great idea. The last time I did, it was when I wrote about Speeding Up Your Blog To Keep Your Readers Happy sometimes last May. You may want to check that sucker out to see what I did to make things go faster. That was then, and this is now, so here’s some of the stuff I did yesterday to improve my reader’s experience.

- Remove Useless Scripts: These are scripts that are not providing any real value. The first one to go was a lousy performing Adsense ad. Then I removed several that resided in the footer and a few others like the Alexa icon.
- Pruning Your Plugins: My plugin arsenal was starting to become a little unmanageable. The Top Commentators plugin and several other plugins all had to go so I could increase my blog’s speed. All in all, I tossed ten plugins.
- Optimizing Images: Having a lot of images on your blog is almost like trying to run with an open parachute attached to your back. Optimizing them reduces a lot of that load, making things move a lot faster. I used a free site called Dynamic Drive to optimize my images. Either upload the image from your computer, or you can provide the URL to the picture. What I liked about their service is you can select from several optimized images so you can choose the best one.
- Hosting Your Image: By this, I’m referring to any banners that you’re displaying on your blog. Images hosted elsewhere can slow your blog down if their server is under a heavy load.
- Using The More Tag: I never used to use this tag but using one can improve your blog’s home page speed quite a bit as it only shows a truncated version of each post, and if that post has images and videos it can improve your blog’s loading speed.
- Pingdom Tools: Pingdom tools was high, partly because it tested the load time of my blog but mostly because it helped me to find out some of the things that were slowing it down.
I hope you found my taking the time to increase your blog’s speed of some use.
You May Find The Following Of Interest
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