Thursday 3 January 2013

Optimizing Your Blog's Load Time

Important: All scripts hosted on widcraft.googlecode.com don't work anymore because Google has blocked that SVN repository.

Your site's loading time is a vital factor in its ability to engage its readers. Our users don't like a site, which takes way to much time to load. Even we like Google Search because it takes very little time to load. Optimizing your blog/site's loading time is a must, and today we'll learn about it. Here comes the Service called PageSpeed Insights.

What is PageSpeed Insights?

PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster. Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates.

Test Your Blog's Score

Go to PageSpeed Insights and Enter the URL and Press Analyze.After a bit of loading you will get a detailed deport discussing your site's loading time. You'll get a lot of reports on where your site's loading time is good or bad. You'll get your report in five parts:

  • High priority. These suggestions represent the largest potential performance wins for the least development effort.
  • Medium priority. These suggestions may represent smaller wins or much more work to implement.
  • Low priority. These suggestions represent the smallest wins. You should only be concerned with these items after you've handled the higher-priority ones.
  • Experimental rules. These suggestions are experimental, but do not affect the overall PageSpeed score.
  • Already done!. There are no suggestions for these rules, since this page already follows these best practices. Good job!

Now some very important things to consider while optimizing your Score

  • Combine images into CSS sprites: This becomes very important if you're using lots of icons on your site.
  • Optimize images: Properly formatting and compressing images can save many bytes of data.
  • Minify JavaScript: Compacting JavaScript code can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time.
  • Place CSS in Head: Any external CSS file should be placed in the <head> tag as it helps in fast rendering of the Page
  • Specify image dimensions: Specifying a width and height for all images allows for faster rendering by eliminating the need for unnecessary reflows and repaints.
  • Remove Unused CSS and JavaScript: If you're not using a css or javascript then don't forget to remove it.

Here are several reasons of your blog's low speed

  • Leverage browser caching: Blogger doesn't give you access to the .htaccess file where you have to set the expiry date for your resources, making them cacheable.
  • Default CSS File: Blogger loads a CSS file namely bundle.css ,over which you have no control. This file contains default styling of Blogger widgets.
  • Slow Widgets: Remove Gadgets like Facebook Like Box and Followers Gadget, as the images of members that are loaded ,very badly effect Load Times and Page Size.

Every blog has their own different problems and some of them are their publisher networks like Clicksor. Don't forget to leave a comment with your score...!!!
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