Reduce The Load Time Of Your Blog

One of the most important factor which determines the success of a blog is it's load time. Take StumbleUpon for example, it's users are notorious for having a very short attention span. If you cannot attract their attention within the first 30 seconds, the next site is just the click of a button away. So if you blog takes too long to load, chances are that you would never be able to leverage the true potential of StumbleUpon or other related social sites.

With their limited template designs, numerous widgets for additional functionality, most of the Blogspot users face this problem, and they complain their blogs of being sluggish. So here are some tips to increase the load time of your Blogspot blog.

1. Decrease the number of posts shown on the home page. You can edit it from your Blogger dashboard by going to Settings > Formatting tab. I would say something less than 10 would be a nice idea.

2. You cannot avoid using JavaScript and links on your blog, just make sure that you place them towards the bottom of your blog, just above the tag. And if you must use them as a widget, then put them towards the bottom of your sidebar.

3. Try to use less images, video and other multimedia files on your blog, they hugely increases the load time of a blog.

4. Try and reduce the size of the images that you are using, better you put up a thumbnail which would point to the actual full-size image.

5. Use the Picasa album for you uploading your photos.

6. Try to use JPEG images instead of PNG or GIFF.

7. If possible, check for cross browser functionality.

8. Try to avoid using too many widgets.

9. Make sure your template code is valid.

10. In case you are using custom CSS, put it towards the top of the page.

These are only some of the tips that would help your blog load faster. If you think that I have missed some major point, please put them in the comments. And if you are a first time visitor, consider subscribing to my RSS feed.