Article: How To Make Your Blogger Blog Load Faster
When Source Blogger was first created, it was on a blogger template (as source-blogger.com). Being marketed as a blog for bloggers, I wanted to integrate a lot of different resources for bloggers – only the more I added, the more I belabored the loading time of my blogger blog’s home page and internal pages.
Why was the load time so important? Because the speed at which your blog loads is critical to attracting more readers to your blog. If your blog takes a long time to load, many readers may leave your blog before they have the chance to read it.
As was mentioned in The Top 10 Reasons Why Source Blogger Moved To WordPress, the previous site for Source Blogger (Hosted on Google Blogger with a Blogger template) loaded extremely slow and was beginning to shoot error messages to Internet Explorer users who did not having the right debugging setting.
Imagine my horror as I was showing my site to a few friends at a family gathering only to see an error message come up, preventing the site from displaying.
Here are a few tips and tricks that will help your Blogger blog load faster and attract more users:
Posts
Your blog’s load time can be affected by the number of posts you display on your main page. You can easily edit the number of posts displayed of the main page from the Settings Formatting tab. You can then select the number of posts you want to display on the main page. We recommend displaying 10 or fewer posts on the main page.
Third Party JavaScript and Links
For optimal blog load speed, we recommend using Google/Blogger widgets, JavaScript and links. However, if you need to use third party JavaScript and links, your blog will load much faster if you put all JavaScript at the bottom of your blog. If you have third party JavaScript and links in your sidebar, put them in at the bottom of the sidebar.
Images and Media
The more images, videos and other multi-media you have on your blog the longer it will take to load. However, images and other multimedia are important to attracting users to your blog, so it is important to optimize the load speed of your images and media. Here are a few tips to increase the load speed of your media:
Decrease the size of your images or use thumbnails that link to the full-size image.
If you use third party images, consider uploading them to Picasa Web Albums via the Blogger post editor.
If you have a large number of images to display, you can upload all your images (from a vacation or event) to a Picasa Web Album and link to the album in your post or sidebar.
Other suggestions
If you’ve added any custom CSS to your blog, make sure you put it at the top of the page.
The most important content of your blog that catches reader’s attention should load the quickest. To help you identify which items are taking the longest to load you can use Stopwatch. To use Stopwatch, enter your blog’s URL into the text box and click “Start StopWatch”. Stopwatch will then open your blog in a frame and will record the time it takes for everything on your blog to load, including images, videos, widgets, etc. Take note of the items that take the longest to load and modify them appropriately using these suggestions.
Your turn!
Have you discovered methods for increasing the speed of your Blogger blog? Why not share it with the community here at Source Blogger?
4 Comments
Too many posts on the main page is very annoying especially for people the are visiting with Netbooks or Laptops most people think that everyone has the same speed of an internet connection and graphics card.One way I have found to speed up your blog is to use CSS compression the only problem with this is that when the code is compacted it’s hard to make edits.
roezer recently posted..Things to Do with a Blog Post to Insure Extra Visitors
Thanks for this post. I changed the number of posts on my homepage from 10 to 4 and the speed in terms of page-load time improved immensely almost immediately.
Hi Miguel,
I visited your site and would like to offer a couple suggestions. Please note, that being your blog, you have a right to manage it as you wish. Please take no offense.
1) Remove the Blogger Nav Bar at the top of the page. 1 simple line of code in your HTML can prevent this.
2) Do not show full articles on your pages; especially your homepage. Simply a brief summary to draw the reader followed by a page break which will be seen to readers as: READ MORE.
That will do it.
Let me know if I can be of any help to you on this.
I am writing an article on this now.
Thanks, Miguel.
Source Blogger recently posted..So You Say Blogging Is Dead Is That So
yeah putting js at the end really improves the load time
Anurag recently posted..CSS Custom 404 not found pages for Blogger.