A user will love to visit a site whose load time is 2 seconds to 4 seconds and the maximum is 7 seconds if your site or blog is taking more than that, i.e. more than 7 seconds than there is a 98% chance that the user will close your site. And it’s a necessary step to decrease the Blog loading time or blog for better SEO score and user experience
There are plenty of articles that give you information on how to speed up your WordPress blog. The problem is that unless you are a website programmer yourself, most of the information given is too technical, and to advanced, for most people to understand. This article gives you simple and plain advice on how to make your WordPress Blog loading time a little bit faster.
It is advised to check the Blog loading time of your site frequently because there are many factors that can affect the load time of your site or blog.
GT Metrics and Pingdom are the best tools to perform a Website Speed Test.
Why Blog loading time Is Important
If you are trying to access a website and it will take 15 seconds to load, will you like it or try to revisit the page, your answer is “A BIG NO”, definitely, no will like to visit those pages. As I have already discussed, your website should have a maximum of 7seconds to load if it doesn’t that you need to work on it for better user experience.
As per a report by the Microsoft Bing search team, a 2-second longer delay in load time of a web page reduces user satisfaction by 3.8% and it can increase lost revenue per user by 4.3% and it will reduce the clicks or hits by 4.3%.
Now, as Google is using the Penguin algorithm, they also include your site speed while ranking your site, so as I already told you that it will directly hurt your SEO score and website rank.
How To Reduce Blog loading time
Sometimes it is your web hosting fault
If your blog has suddenly begun to see an awful lot more traffic, then your blog’s host may be causing your loading problems. When you searched online originally for your host, you may not have been able to anticipate the sheer number of viewers that your blog would receive every day. If your hosting company is not optimized for high numbers of traffic, then your blog will have loading and accessibility problems. On the other hand, you may have been unlucky and bought services from a poor quality host who is not maintaining their server very well.
I will recommend you to use Bluehost. Bluehost is an award-winning web hosting and their shared web hosting plan is the most affordable and quickest way to get your website or blog online. It’s perfect for blogs, online stores, e-commerce sites, portfolios and even complex database-driven websites and best of all, with solid-state drives (SSDs), your website will load 200% faster.
Get a Bluehost account now and improve your site speed
Choose A Good Theme Or Framework
The fact is that there are some WordPress themes that take a little longer to load than other types of themes. This may not matter much to some blogs, but if your blog pages are particularly heavy, then the extra KB added to your WordPress blog may be adding to your loading problems
When you install a WordPress script on your server, the default theme is “Twenty Fifteen” and this theme is much lightweight and speedy theme.
As per my experience, the fastest loading WordPress themes or frameworks is Thesis Themes or Genesis Themes. It is solid frameworks that will not go to slow down your site and with this theme, you don’t need extra plugins or custom edits. You can directly make the changes from the theme. Simply enjoy ..!!
Use a popular and reputable plugin
There are an awful lot of WordPress plugins out there at the moment. And, some of them are quite reputable and popular. Three are plugins that will help you to optimize your blogs so that you can speed up its loading time. It is your job to seek out the most reputable WordPress plugin for the job. The reason you need a reputable WordPress plugin is that if you download one that has a sketchy reputation, then you may be unknowingly installing a back door into your WordPress blog, which is going to leave it vulnerable to access by hackers.
Use W3 Total Cache Plugin
Even though you should always be wary of an article that recommends a specific plugin, you should find a decent cache plugin to help you to speed up the loading time of your blog. The W3 Total Cache plugin is one of the better ones, but feel free to find one that suits your needs. A good cache plugin will help people to easily reload the blog pages that they have already seen once. So for example, if your users have to keep going back to your home page, they will only have to load it once.
Reducing memory load on your server you are directly reduced your WordPress site load time as the protocol will take less time to read all files
Optimize Your Blog Homepage
This will not help you much, but every single drop will help you to fill your container. The same thing is here, you need to Optimize your blog homepage to load quickly, and this is the most important part because 75% of your traffic directly lands on your blog homepage and if they aren’t they will surely check your homepage.
Things you should do to optimize your homepage to load faster :
- Show excerpts of each post instead of using full posts, this will increase your user experience too.
- Reduce the number of posts featuring on your homepage.
- Remove inactive plugins or plugins which you are not using.
- Don’t use social media buttons on your homepage, use those widgets only in between the posts.
- Overall, the user wants a clean and focused homepage design.
Compress or optimize your videos and images
You must do this so that they will load a little quicker. You can do it in a number of ways such as changing file types. For example, a BMP file is going to be bigger than a Jpeg file. You can change your images from BMP files to Jpeg files so that they load a little quicker.
As we all know that High Quality (HQ) images take up a lot of space on the hard drive and when you upload those images on an FTP, you can imagine what are you doing with your site speed and even you don’t want to compromise with the quality of the images. There is a plugin called WP Smush which automatically reduced the size of the image without affecting the quality of images.
It’s very easy to use it when you simply upload an image file on WordPress, you will see WP Smush already smashed it and reduced the size of that image and quality of the image is still as it was.
Add LazyLoadTo Your Images
It (LazyLoad) is a process in which images above the fold will appear to the user and as the user will scroll down more images will start loading, just before they came into view.
This will help you to save bandwidth too by loading less data for users who don’t scroll down on your pages. To do this, you need to install the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin.
You can do similar things with your videos too. You can also make your images and videos a little smaller so that there is less to load.
Deactivate any unused plugins
This is always a good idea, and if you are having a lot of trouble with slow loading times then try deactivating your unused plugins to see if it actually makes a bigger difference than you first imagined it would.
Split Comments into Pages
If your blog is quite popular then you must be getting lots of comments and these comments will decrease your user experience as it will show a small scroll bar and also this will increase your website load time. So it is better to split the comment section into pages for better user experience and to reduce the WordPress blog load time.
It’s not a difficult task, you can easily do pagination for comment section by going into Settings -> Discussion into your WordPress panel.
Upgrade To Latest WordPress Version
When you log in to your WordPress admin panel, you can see a notification asking you to upgrade the version of WordPress. If you have not done this already then you should do it now. You may actually find that this is your problem, and there are hundreds of reasons why upgrading your WordPress blog could fix your slow loading time.
For example, your older version may have already been hacked, and upgrading your WordPress may remove the code that the hacker is using to access your blog. It may be that your older version is not compatible with the most recent web browsers. Whatever the case may be, you should try upgrading your WordPress blog to the most recent version.
Disable Hotlinking And Prevent Exploitation Of Your Content :
Hotlinking is a form of bandwidth “theft.” It occurs when other sites the direct link to the images on your site from their articles making your server load increasingly high.
This can add up as more and more people “scrape” your posts or your site (and especially images) become more popular, as must do if you create custom images for your site on a regular basis.