September 10, 2012 by akhilendra
How To Improve Page Speed?
If you are managing a blog or any other website then you know the value of SEO in your life. If you are putting focus and efforts on optimizing your blog or site then what are the steps you are taking improve your page speed.
Page speed can be roughly defined as the amount of time taken by your webpage to load when someone opens your blog.
In my experience, I have seen that page speed is often not even the last things which most of the bloggers and webmasters focus.
Most of us will do anything for;
- Content creation
- Link building
- On page optimization
- Social media marketing
- Traffic generation from any other source like guest post and blog commenting.
But in the rush of achieving higher and better results, we tend to ignore this very critical part of our blog.
Page speed also contributes to the seo of your blog. Better page speed helps in better performance.
Imagine if someone clicked a link of your site in Google search result or directly typed your url in the browser and it is taking ages to load your page, most often visitor will leave your site then waiting for it.
Page speed is one of the most critical aspects of your blogging life. So if your page speed is not good, it’s like a beautiful store with its door closed or barely open.
There are three types of factors which affect your page speed.
- High priority factors
- Medium priority factors
- Low priority factors
These factors include anything and everything related to your website. It includes various components of your website, just to name few;
- Css
- Html markups
- Database
- Images on your blog
- Videos on your blog
- Broken links
- External and internal javascript
- Extra white spaces in characters on your webpage
- Load on your server.
You can use Google Page Speed tool to check your page speed score. It doesn’t give you page speed; it gives you a score which is even better.
Your score is directly proportional to your blog’s optimization level.
If your score is low, then you should take this at high priority and address the issues. It will also give a report telling you the areas of improvement for your site.
If you are using wordpress to manage your blog then you can use plugins to do that. There are few very good cache plugins to do that. You can also use Content Delivery Network (CDN) services to improve your site’s page speed.
Cache plugins are free and can improve your blog’s performance by;
- Page cache
- Caching of rss, comments and posts.
- Caching of database.
- Browser caching
- Minifying your images, white spaces and other queries.
- HTTP compression of your html, css and java files
These are some of the very basic features of these plugins. In fact, it takes lot more to optimize your web pages to improve your performance and these plugins are capable of doing most of these things, in fact some of the best plugins can do almost all the activities required for web page optimization for page speed.
Two most popular wordpress cache plugins are free;
1 WP Super cache
2. W3 Total Cache
WP super cache is a very basic cache plugin which delivers extremely good performance. When I say basic I nowhere mean to say that it provides only basic features. It is basic because it is easy to use and even non-technical or users with little technical skills can use it easily.
It can significantly improve your page speed.
W3 Total cache plugin is slightly advanced and require you to have little bit of more information about the process of caching to configure it. I must say it is not very difficult also, once you go through it, you can configure it and it also gives extremely good results.
Till sometime back, I was using W3 Total cache to manage my site but then I had some issues, so now I have switched to WP Super Cache.
Managing your hosting accounts and using cache plugins is the best way to optimize your blog’s page load speed. Hosting is not very expensive & you already have it and wordpress cache plugins are free so practically it doesn’t take much to automate the entire process.
So there are no issues which can make you to ignore this. So start optimizing your page load and performance.
If you are using any other wordpress cache plugins, please share with us. It will help others.
Or
Share any tips or steps to improve the page speed.
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