If you browse few pages on my blog, you will notice that the load time has drastically decreased and the pages load in less than 1 second (if not, then you might be on a slow connection). I did a lot of changes to the backend of my blog, here is what I did.
Before starting off, I want to tell that I did a lot of research and asked a lot of bloggers for the feedback and helping me out with my quest to get a fast loading blog. Many of them were really helpful when I put them in action.
Few People told me to change my theme as but I didn’t want to change it so early. I decided to keep my theme even though taking this theme off could have decreased the load time a little bit more.
Cutting down the Plugins
I was using over 27 plugin and few of them were just for showing page numbers, showing related post and stuff like that, these things can easily be done using a single line of php code inside the blog. Do a Google search and you will find tons of information about it. But, people go ahead only if you understand a little bit of .php and html.
Moving Scripts to the Bottom
There were few scripts which are in header.php, which is the first thing that loads with the blog. I simply moved all the codes to the footer.php. IF you are using Google Analytics, you should put the codes in footer.php instead of anywhere else.
Removing useless functionalities and JavaScript
You should keep in mind that the more functionality you add to your site the more time it will take to load. So you will have to make a choice and set some priorities about what you want to keep and what thing you want to remove from your blog. Features like Post slider, image slider, tabs and many other flashy things require JavaScript files, which will add load to your site. I decided to remove those which I did not need.
Using W3 Total Cache Plugin
After trying few Cache Plugins, I decided to go with W 3 Total Cache Plugin which is super easy to configure and offers powerful features like browser compression, database compression and ability to minify CSS, HTML and JavaScript to compress and speed up your blog’s performance
Optimizing Images
We all know that simple text doesn’t add much weight to the load to the site speed, but the codes and images. You can minify your JavaScript, CSS and HTML and optimize your images. While you can minify your CSS, HTML and JavaScript using W3 Total Cache, you can use Smush.It for optimizing your blog images.
Using CDN (Content Delivery Network)
If your blog is getting visitors from various locations around the world, using CDN is a great Idea, what it basically does is, it stores your blog’s file at multiple places and the visitors gets connected to the nearest server which results in increasing the speed of your blog. Here are 3 best Free CDN you can use for your blog.
The above 6 methods were used by me on my blogs to boost their speed and I am very happy with the results. I still keep checking for the best settings I can do to make it even faster but as I said, you can’t get the speed and functionality both at the same time.
Google also offers a small web tool which can help you improve your webpage speed.
