What Is Page Speed?
A web page speed is also known as “page-load time“.  It is the time taken for a page on your blog or website to completely load, once a user tries to open a page. If you are new to web designing, you might not be aware of all the factors that affects page-speed and how to improve your page speed. In most cases your page speed is affected by Page Size, host and requests.

5 Tips To Improve Your Blog Load Time

#1 Remove Unwanted Or Inactive Plugins
Take a look at your installed plugins list and remove the inactive ones or unwanted plugins. They are likely to place a strain on your server resources because WordPress loads all plugins when a page loads. Make sure you keep all your plugins, themes and wordpress up to date.

#2 Use Right Theme For Your Blog
Go for some theme that is cool and simple looking. It’s important to understand that fewer images will equals less loading time, which means a speedier site. Choose themes with the fewest possible images and a CSS-based design, try to avoid flash or other fancy designs. You might want to choose a minimalist theme and modify it to suit your needs. I think you can make use of  Thesis.

#3 Make Use Of WordPress Object Cache
By inserting this simple line of code into your wp-config.php file, you can set WordPress to start caching database queries rather than initiating new server requests on each load.

// Enable the WordPress Object Cache:
define(ENABLE_CACHE, true);

By reducing the number of queries, you’ll increase speed of your site, and reduce the server resources that are consumed each time you receive a visitor. As a result, you’ll find that it will make your web host much happier in the event of a huge traffic spike.

Make use of Cache Plugins:
The main plugin that meets this need is the WP Super Cache, which does exactly what it says. It caches posts and stores them as files on the server so that repeated requests are dealt with faster and with fewer resources. The plugin will automatically update as comments are added so the dynamic nature of the blog isn’t lost.

I have tried this on my blog, it’s working great.

#4 Minimize Your Images
A clean page means speed, you have to balance that with the fact that strong supporting images are key to a successful blog. By ensuring your images are correctly and compressed, you can help increase your blog’s speed.

The easiest way to remember formatting is like this:

Images that use only a few colors should be saved as .GIF or .PNG files, and images that use a full spectrum of colors (like true photographs) should be saved as .JPG files. If you use photo editing software, like Photoshop, you can “save for the web,” which will find the best format to save, while still maintaining quality.

Next you should resize images to the smallest possible size to get the job done. When doing so, the color format should be RGB, as indexed images don’t scale well.

When saving, set the total color amount to the smallest value possible without sacrificing quality. A combination of these steps will greatly decrease your image size and therefore your server response time. You should play around a bit to find the right format and experiment when uploading to determine which settings produce the smallest, high-quality image.

For WordPress there a plugin that will minimize images automatically when you upload it.

Here is a link to the plugin

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/

#5 Compress Scripts
Usually wordpress blogs have many CSS files, to load each CSS file a request will be sent to the server, it results in slowing down your blog. You can either join the CSS files manually or you can use CSS Sprites. CSS  sprites is a plugin for wordpress, which will be very handy in helping you to compress CSS files.

Link to the plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/csprites-for-wordpress/

Say Good bye to slow blogs :)

About the author

Praveen Raj wrote 288 articles on this blog.

My name is Praveen, founder and editor-in-chief of Geeks4share.com I am from India. Here I blog about blogging tips, money making, tech news, SEO, traffic building and more tips and tricks all related to computer or internet. If you like my blog don't forget to spread a word to your friends.