The Technical Side of Blogging – Part 3 : Make Your Blog Load Faster

DudeBloggers, General, Technology, Tutorials 2 Comments

Making your site load faster is one of the key things you should focus on! Visitors hate sites that take forever to load, and site ranking engines take the load time into consideration when ranking the website overall.

Lets get to it:

1. Remove, disable, uninstall unwanted/unnecessary plugins:

Some plugins require so much data to be fetched from the database that they make the site load time double or even triple. Try to reduce using plugins that will query the database all the time.

2. Use Caching

Caching speeds up the load time, by having parts of your website stored on visitor’s computers. I’d recommend W3 Total Cache, its simple and straight forward and you can find how to set it up with a simple search.

3. Don’t use too many videos on your blog posts.

Although the file might not be stored on your web server, usually video files will load with websites within iframes. I.e. when the page loads, also the video will load, even though not watched.

4. Use CDN’s (Content Delivery Networks)

What are they? Well in easy terms, CDNs replicate your images and files and allow you to point to the replicas in order to load your site from many different servers, thus allowing many simultaneous connections to load the site. We currently use AWS (from Amazon) and that allowed us to be able to load images from up to 8 different servers, minimizing the loading time and allowing for faster downloading of all our website’s content.

Comments 2

  1. First of all, Thank you for sharing this 🙂

    Regarding to point 3, even if I added embedded link, will load the video?

    This is first time I heard about CDN ! Great information …Thanks a lot !

    1. Post
      Author

      Hello Memo, usually when you embed youtube videos they load when clicked on only, but having so many videos will mean that your site will do additional requests from youtube to get the static image that comes on the video (the image that appears before playback).
      CDN will improve the load time of the site by at least 50%. Its amazing, takes a while to setup but well worth it if you use a lot of images and costs less than $5 per month.

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