I was having cool chat with my blogging friend roezer at Blog HQ. Suddenly he drop me a link and small comment "This looks bad". It showed me a colorful diagram and it wasn't look that bad for me. After looking into the details I figure it out that it is the loading time for the blog. It took over 5seconds to load fully. Seriously, it looked really bad. This is how I made my blog load faster and you can do the same.
Here is the steps I followed and seriously if you want your blog to load fast you can follow the same.
1. Check your blog loading time with Pingdom Tools.
Copy and paste your URL and click Test now.
It will start testing your site and show the break down of your blog loading time.
If it is taking longer than couple of seconds then you need to make it load faster
If your site loads withing couple of seconds then you do not have to waste your time making it load faster. Yepppi!!!
2. Go through the list and figure out what components took time to load. In Pingdom Tools you can sort it by loading time and it will give you a better picture. Also, you can check the individual items by clicking on the links.
Back up your template and blog before going to step 3
3. Now you need to take some brave actions. Which I had to do. Most of the time we collect junk in our blogs. Add all the cool gadgets we come a cross and we do not remove them even if it doesn't perform.
Get rid of all the gadgets that you think that dose not help you.
Get rid of scripts that run behind unless they are really useful.
4. Optimize the images.
You can make your blog load faster by optimizing the images you use in the blog. Online Image Optimizer will be good tool to reduce the size of your image by 30% to 70% without affecting the quality of the image. You can choose the best image suite for your blog.
5. Now you can do the test again and you will be surprised with the results. I manage to reduce to loading time to 3 Seconds from 5 Seconds
There are some design issues you can fix to make your blog load faster but it takes time and money to redesign your blog. Until that you can follow this simple steps to make it load faster.