Optimize Your Blogger Blog to Load Faster

It’s annoying when you visit a blog and it takes whole day to load. It takes no longer than 10 seconds to grab the attention of your visitors. So optimizing and making your blog load and render faster not only help your visitors to browse your site faster but also makes an overall good impression. And now it's an SEO factor too.

Not only you need a good host, removing unnecessary scripts and widgets and optimizing your images and template is also important. So you need to optimize your blog for the best performance and load faster. Let us have a quick look how to optimize your blogs to load faster.

Optimize your Stylesheets

W3 HTML specification clearly states that stylesheets should be put in the HEAD section which allows the page to render fast, properly and progressively. Bloggers who care about performance want a page to load faster, especially important for blogs with lots of content and widgets. This helps visitor with slower internet connections, who is waiting for the page to load, to view your blog properly. This improves the overall user experience.

Compress CSS

Remove unnecessary codes from CSS to reduce its size and improve loading times. Compress CSS, that is, remove unneeded white space, characters space, newlines and tabs. This improves response time performance because the size of the downloaded file is reduced. There are many online CSS Compressor tools, just Google it.

Optimize Images.

Compress and optimize your images. You can do it manually or you can also can Google for online image optimizers. Scale you images properly and use proper ‘alt’ attribute, for example, if your blog post image is 125x125 pixels then use:

<img alt="description of the image" height="125" scr="/image.png" width="125" />

JavaScript at Bottom.

Put JavaScript in BODY Section or before closing HEAD. For example, if some scripts don't need much attention, place it before </body> tag. In some situation, some scripts are used to style your blog. For example, you are using jQuery Slide Show. So you need jQuery library. Then move the script below in the HEAD section, just above </head> tag.

Use an External JavaScript.

JavaScript that are not external may reduce the number of DNS lookups and HTTP requests but also increases the size of the Blog and Blogger Template. While, if the JavaScript are used as external files then these are cached by the browsers which not only reduces the size of the template but also reduces the HTTP requests after the page of your blog is loaded after first time. You can use Google to host your project and JavaScript.

Reduce DNS Lookups and HTTP requests.

Remove unnecessary badges, images, files that are from different and unique hostnames. It takes some time (milliseconds) for DNS to look for the IP addresses for the given hostnames. The browser is unable to download anything from the hosts until the DNS lookup is completed. Reducing the number of host-names reduces the number of DNS lookups and HTTP requests. This helps the blog to load faster.

This blog optimization guide is the timed down version of Yahoo! - Speeding up Your Website. I have explained it in short but important points to load your blog faster for better performance and SEO.