Is your blog really quick loading as you think it is?

Have you tested and calculated the time required to load up your website on various internet connection speeds?
If yes, you are a superstar. If not, you’re still a superstar. Why? Read further..

It is a fact that on various speeds of internet, your blog loads at various speeds. On slower connections, it takes more time to load and on faster broadband connections, it takes less time. So how should you maintain the loading speed for your blog? Can you maintain a universal speed at which the blog will load? Yes. Indeed.

For maintaining a universal loading time for your blog, first you have to find out the factors that determine your blogs loading speed.

1. Images
Images are the first and foremost thing that affect the page loading time of your blog. To know how many images are being used on your blog, either select all (CTRL+A) on the homepage or right click and view source and count the number of <IMG tags in it. If the number if images used are more than 10-15, then I strongly recommend that you cut it down to a a lesser number say 6-10.

It’s not just the number of images used, but the file sizes as well that counts. If you are using a heavy graphic design based template, it’s likely that your header templates i eating up a lof of bandwidth. Check if you have a heavy header template, if it’s more than 100kb you may want to optimize the image by reducing it’s file size in Adobe Photoshop.

It’s a good practice to use GIF images (non-animation without frames) instead of Jpegs for header images as GIF images are more optimized for the web and they can save you some page loading time.

2. Tables
Does your template use tables extensively? To check this, right click and view the source code, and see if there are more td and tr tags in the body section. You can also select all by clicking CTRL+A and carefully seeing if there are tables in your design. This is not easy and only a web designer can really make out a table so relying on the first method will be a better idea.
Next, see if your template uses CSS heavily. This can be found by checking if you have lost of CSS classes above the body section in the head section.Bottom Line - having lot of tables in your template is bad, while relying more on CSS is a better option. CSS helps faster loading than tables and is more maneuverable too.

3. Template structure
Do you have a template with two or three column? It’s likely that there is a delay in loading the main content in slower connections. You can test it on a slower internet connection at a cafe may be. This is not a common observation but I’ve seen that many three column templates are not optimized and loading the main content area takes time more than the left hand column.

4. Javascript
This is a common thing noted on many of the blogs. There are lot of widgets and third party scripts available targeted for blogs today that it’s easy to get tempted and include them in your blog. While many of them provide us nothing but just a show off, we don’t realize that it is in fact harming our blogs. Adding these scripts to your footer and page template often looks simple and easy to install but they really pull down the page loading time. May be you should think about deleting a few widgets and scripts that you have already installed on your blog and keep them to a minimum.

5. Number of posts on the homepage
Obvious point here. If you keep the number of post to be displayed on the homepage to a minimum, the page loads faster. If not, it takes more time. This may sound silly as even if you load 15 articles on the homepage, it loads quick on your browser. But remember that more posts means more images, and to a slower internet connection it means more elements. So keep that to a minimum.

I could easily come up with another 10 elements that will slow down your page loading time. But I’d like to hear it from you as to what you think is slowing down your blog’s page loading time? Meanwhile, you can test your page loading time here.