Is your site taking too much time for loading ? Then it’s time to do something about it. If you ask why, then here you go. Why does it matter ?
Recently Google posted on its blog about how much “speeding up your page” is important factor in ranking. According to their recent study, users tend to spend less time on sites which takes more time in loading as compared to sites loading quicker.
Before I start, I would strictly advice you to check your page load time with Pingdom tool & With Chrome PageSpeed Insights Extension in order to comapre after applying the below tips. Else you won’t be able to identity the positive effects that you brought using the tips give below
So here I list best ways to decrease your load time and thus will increase your Google SERP Ranking:
1. Minimize your codes :
Remove your CDATA sections, blankspaces and HTML comments. It will decrease the size of your page, resulting in decrease in page load time. For the purpose you can use Will Peavy minifier or Auto-optimize plugin available at wordpress site in plugin section.
2.Reduce DNS lookups:
The DNS lookup a lot of time before a browser can do anything to display a page. So you need to analyze your page’s DNS lookups first. Use tools like Pingdom tools to measure your DNS lookup time. Then improve it using tools Sprite Image or CustomDNSL.
Also Read: SEO For Chrome – Best SEO Tool
3. Enable Mod_pagespeed module:
If your hosting provider supports mod_pagespeed module for Apache then you can enable it by adding this to your .htaccess:
<IfModule pagespeed_module>
ModPagespeed on
ModPagespeedEnableFilters extend_cache
</IfModule>
You can add/remove more filters. This is just an example. As far as I know only Godaddy and Dreamhost support mod_pagespeed in their shared hosting plans. If you are on a dedicated server then you can install it yourself.
4. Use Lazy Loader Plugin:
Use Lazy Loader plugin written with Jquery which delays the loading of images making your page lightning fast. Images outside view-port wont be loaded until your mouse pointer hovers over them.
Also Read: Why not show the full posts on the homepage – excerpts(SEO)
5. Define a Character set:
Define a proper character set in HTTP headers to accelerate browser interpretion . Simply add this piece of code in your header:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″>
6. Use Asynchronous loader on your:
If a reader arrives on your blog, it loads the view-port part of the article and when reader scrolls down, it loads the remaining part. Google recently announced that publishers can loads ads asynchronously. So it’s a a win situation for both readers as well as the publisher.
Asynchronous for WordPress
And for Bloggers :
Login to your blogger dashboard
–> layout
-> Edit HTML
Scroll down to where you see </head> tag .
and add this code : download
7.Optimize your images:
You blog’s one the major time taking element is your images. Although we can’t reduce the number of images as they play a big role in explaining the topic of your article &
there is a famous saying ” A picture speaks thousand words”
So we can reduce the effect of large sized images(in data size) by uploading optimized images.
But How can you do that ?
If you believe in making your own images, then try saving them in PNG format for simple photos in PNG 8 or PNG
For photos with lots of elements like pictures of places, person etc, try saving them in Jpeg format.
8. Select a Good Hosting provider:
For all the word press users, website hosting plays a major role in loading time as well as up-time of your blog. Don’t look for cheap hosting as you may end up getting nothing more than annoyed from their namesake service. Instead go with trusted ones like Hostgator, BlueHost, DreamHost etc.
9. Reduce the number of Ads block :
This may sound a bit harsh, but those ads, even with asynchronous loader ads-up to the loading time. So decrease the number of ads and see positive results in page load time.
10. Discard Unused CSS:
Most Commonly when we add new widgets to our blog, we alter the CSS files of our blog’s theme.
But while removing teh widget, we simply delete the HTML code leaving behind the usless CSS codes in our theme. This also ads to the loading time of your blog. So make sure that you remove them when you remove that respective widget from your blog
Now that you have applied the above methods, do check your Pingdom Tools again to see the difference
About Author:
This is a Guest post by AMaan Rizwan from Techanger
What other methods do you try ? Share with us in comments !
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