Simply, Page Loading Time counts as the first impression of the visitor experience, I might not consider getting back to a certain site if I felt uncomfortable about it while surfing from page to page due to slow overall responsiveness.
That's why I started optimizing this blog to achieve a superior experience in comparison to what it used to be, it's getting better and better everyday as I never stop tinkering to maximize the performance. Anyway, How would a blogger benchmark his progress during the process? Here's the answer, try these free services:
So, according to my own experience I recommend for you to look after several points, let me elaborate.
1. Host Your Blog and Files on a Reliable Server
This is probably the most important point, please verify the quality of your web hosting company or server. Personally, I am using Blogger platform which is a free blog hosting service provided by Google themselves and blogger is known to be arguably the most reliable and secure platform in terms of up time and overall security.Also, if you are using a different service to host and store files, photos and other media of your blog separately it would be much better, especially when you are using a low cost hosting solution, that way you will reduce the load due to high traffic so that visitors will only consume text content from your actual server.
2. Stop Using JavaScript Everywhere
Yes, many bloggers flood the site with widgets and other scripts written in JavaScript, which is extremely bad for your blog performance. For example, in my blog I only use one or two widgets involving JS, while I try to make use of basic HTML to implement many things and expand my blog functionality without affecting page responsiveness.Apparently, when I ran the page loading test using the same tools I told you about, I've found a lot of useful hints to improve performance, try that for yourself and you will be surprised.
3. Reduce Number of Images
Well, I strongly encourage the use of text and CSS3 features on modern websites, there is no doubt that images are the most bandwidth extensive resource that leads to throttling your blog performance. In my case, I used CSS to replace many elements inside my blog from an image to a basic box or a digital symbol, you can mimic the same effect of an image by making use of borders, boxes, Font Awesome, Symbols and many more.Similarly, if you are writing an article consider including one or at most two images, try to make it as simple as you can. There is no doubt that at least one image is vital to make each post look more attractive even though not using one at all is definitely better for performance.
4. Optimize Images to Reduce File Size
Images created by graphics design software are unnecessarily oversized, and so are those captured by fancy modern Cameras and high-end smartphones. Most bloggers obtain their original images this way, here's what I usually do to reduce size several times lower:- Convert images to JPG, PNG or GIF extensions, which are the most lightweight and common. I personally prefer PNG for my blog posts.
- Look for software to further optimize and reduce size images.
I like to use GIMP which is a free and open source image editing software with various options to reduce size of images supporting almost any extension. For example, you could take an image captured by your smartphone, reduce its size from like 4MB to about 200KB and barely affect its quality.
5. Optimize Code Structure
Here's another procedure I like to do on my blog, I rearrange JS code and place scripts before theFinally, I wish you are having a great experience surfing the content on my blog, if you have any thoughts regarding this particular topic that you would like to share with me, do not hesitate to post in the comment section below.
