Tips to Speedup Blog Loading Time.

Your blog should load fast even on dial up connections or you will lose traffic. Test your blog speed at Speedtester. Just copy and paste your blog URL in the box and type the letters and click the button 'Check'. You will get the time taken for your blog to load in different connections. See picture below : Click image to see bigger view


Here are some tips to increase your blog speed............

TIPS TO SPEEDUP SITE LOADING

1. METATAGS :

Do not use unnecessary metatags like author, copyright etc. Use keyword and description metatags with less than 200 characters in each. Use the Google metatag to verify your site and the newly introduced Yahoo metatag for site authentication. Use the ROBOTS metatag for search engine spiders.




2. JAVASCRIPT IN EXTERNAL DOCUMENTS :

Put your Javascript code in an external file. Create a file in Notepad and paste your Javascript code in it and save it as Myjavascript.js. Then upload it to a freehost and put the link to the file in your template at the appropriate place like this :

<script language="JavaScript" src="LINK OF MYJAVASCRIPT.JS FILE" type="text/javascript"></script>

Similarly you can also put your CSS in an external file.




3. DECREASE WHITE SPACE AND USE AJAX:

Decreasing the amount of white space in your posts decreases the size of the page and the blog loads faster. AJAX shorthand for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML," when used in your template can speed your blog loading especially when used with JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).




4. COMPRESS CSS :

You can compress your CSS using online CSS TWEAK utility. Go to Dashboard and click on Layout. Then click on Edit Html subtab of Template tab. Copy all your CSS between <b:skin><![CDATA[ and
]]></b:skin> without including them. Then paste it in box on that CSS tweak page and click Tweak after choosing the options. Then copy and paste the tweaked CSS back into template and save. Remember to Backup Template first.




5. IMAGES :

Specify width and height of images in the code lines for images loaded from another host. For best results use Thumbnails Images so that copying images is rendered useless and also they load faster.





6. USE CSS INSTEAD OF TABLES :

Tables use much more code and in Blogger produce large amounts of whitespace causing the page to load slowly. You have to arrange the table code in a single continuous line to get rid of the whitespace.





7. USE A SLASH AT END OF DIRECTORY LINKS :

All directory links when coded should end in a slash. For example :

<a href="http://betabloggerfordummies.blogspot.com/">Dummies Guide to Google Blogger Beta</a>

Note the red / slash in above code.





8. COMPRESS IMAGES :

Use a image file compressor to reduce the size of your image files. Then upload the images to blog.





9. DECREASE COMMENTS :

These are the comments in your template and not the comments in your blog. These are included between /* and */. For example :

/* This is a comment in the template */

Delete unnecessary comments and save the template.





10. NO FLASH CONTENT :

Do not use Flash in your header or in your posts as it increases loading time.