Tips To Speed Up Your Blog - Check Current Speed

Much has been made of the fact that Google will be adding Page Speed as one of the ranking factors in how they promote a site to the top of the proverbial heap in search results. Usually when Matt Cutts says something, anything really, it causes what amounts to slight hysteria among bloggers the world over. And such is the case with the Page Speed factor.

And so I wanted to write a few hubs to give you the reader some tips on things you can implement or change within your installations which will speed up your blogs. I will be focusing strictly on Wordpress installations since this is the platform I know the best, but you can use some of the tips for other installations.

The first hub below goes over the first step of speeding up your blog: Check the Current Speed of Your Blog.

You need a baseline speed report before you start working on your blog, and I strongly suggest Pingdom Tools. With Pingdom, you input your blog's url in the box at the top, then run the test. Pingdom will display the different sections of your blog (stylesheets, images, javascript), and list how long it takes to load each piece, and how large each piece is. On the bottom left will be a summary display how long the page took to load, and the count on how many items were loaded.

What you are looking for here is to determine how slow your blog might be. If your speed test shows anything above 2-3 seconds, then you have some work to do! If you are like me when I began my speed up process, you may have a blog in the 11-15 second range. Using the ideas that I will be sharing in my hubs, you can get your blog down to the 2 second range (or more if you are not on shared hosting).

Before you leave Pingdom Tools, look at the chart where the different parts of your blog have loaded. Do you see any unusually large load times on your images? I found on almost all of the blogs I own that the stylesheet was loading images that were not used in the blog. If you see any long loading images on your own test, verify that the image is being used in your current theme.

I do suggest you make a copy of your stylesheet (to your desktop) before you try this. Once you have made a copy, feel free to remove the image load from your stylesheet.  Save the stylesheet, then load each section of your blog (main page, a post, a page, the archive).  If you cannot find where the image has broken your blog, then go back to Pingdom and see if the change has helped. Chances are, removing any image from a blog's theme will shorten the load time, but you do need to verify that the image is not being used before you remove it.

It also helps to use Pingdom to determine if there are any images on your Wordpress blog that you really don't need.  Say you have an animated gif of a dancing baby at the bottom of your blog?  Is this image really doing anything to help the success of your blog?  If it's not, then remove it!  I like to focus my blogs to what my readers want to see, and not what might be cute.

I personally removed several images on my Arthemia theme that were only being loaded through the stylesheet, but not being used in the blog itself.  I also removed an image at the bottom of the blog that gave a rounded look to the bottom section, but really provided no value to the reader.

So what did I get out of these changes?  3 seconds of load time!  I went from 12-13 down to 9-10 just be implementing this one page enhancement.

If this hub has helped you begin the process of speeding up your own Wordpress blog, check back soon!  I have several hubpages in the works regarding page speed issues involving plug-ins, caching, static html enhancements, and php removal.  Those hubpages will be listed below as they are written.