5 Easy Ways To Improve Your Blog Performance And Speed

5 Easy Ways To Improve Your Blog Performance And Speed

Improving your blog performance. What even does that mean? Your blog is up and running, you publish articles once or twice a week, you promote them on social media and work on your SEO. That’s what you need to bring in traffic, no? Yes. But no. That’s what you need, sure, but not just what you need. Because before taking those gorgeous photos, spending time on writing posts and coming up with tweets, you need to make sure that people will actually be given the best conditions to go on your website.

Because it’s all good and fine to have a lot of people on your website and a lot of page views, but if they don’t stay? Worse, if they do not stay more than a few seconds? Do not read your content, browse your other pages, spend time on your blog? That’s what we call bounce rate. And a high bounce rate is bad. Amongst other things, what can deter people from your blog, make them click the little cross up there and be gone forever? 

Any ideas?

Poor blog performance. Long loading times. A slow website. And sure, some performance tricks will require coding skills and if you are like me then, that may scare you. But fear not! There are plenty of other tips and tricks that will help you improve your blog performance without going to the dark back end of your website!

So, without further ado, let’s get into how to improve your blog performance and speed!

1. Compress your images

Images are key to a visually pleasing blog. Sure the theme helps but pretty images will make a better impression. The thing is, images can be heavy and can slow your website down. Because of the time they may take to load, they can impact your blog performance and speed. Fortunately, that’s an issue you can deal with rather easily. First of all, make sure all your images are JPEG instead of PNG. You can convert PNG into JPEG online or using plugins, so it is no problem. Then, you either use a compressor outside of wordpress or install a plugin such as WP-Optimize or Imagify to compress all the photos that already are on your website. The gain in space and size will really help to improve your blog speed.

2. Minify and combine files

Something else that can be heavy for your website are files associated with plugins, images and other things you are using on your blog. If you go onto your Google Analytics, then on the left column, “behavior”, “site speed” and “speed suggestions”, you will see how long each page take to load on average. Google will also give you suggestions to help improve your blog performance. Amongst other, minifying files can really help! It involves removing unnecessary formatting, whitespace, and code. If your site runs multiple CSS and JavaScript files, you can combine them into one, using plug ins such as WP Rocket or Asset CleanUp.

5 Easy Ways To Improve Your Blog Performance And Speed

3. Inline or remove unnecessary or unused CSS

CSS describes how HTML elements are to be displayed on screen or in other media. CSS saves a lot of work. It can control the layout of multiple web pages all at once. External stylesheets are stored in CSS files. They sort of are rules that your browser follows to display websites correctly. Thing is, some rules become outdated, are no longer necessary, etc. They can come from plugins, your theme, etc. If you do not know anything about coding, I would not recommend you to work with plugins that require you to manually choose what CSS to inline or remove. Install plugins like Autoptimize and its extension CriticalCSS. Or again, WP Rocket. They will list unnecessary or unused CSS for you and will work on each on them in turn. You won’t have to touch or worry about anything. This is one thing I was so scared of doing, too afraid of ever touching something and disabling something essential on my blog.

4. Enable browser caching

When you visit a website, the elements on the page will be stored on your hard drive in a cache. It is like temporary storage. Thus, next time you will go on that website, your browser will load the page without sending a HTTP request to the server. As a consequence, your browser will not have to download all the HTML documents, stylesheets, javascript files and images, since it “already knows them”. You then won’t have to wait before being able to use the page, which will load much faster. Of course, as your website changes, a few components will need to be downloaded but it will not take much time. As caching is great for returning visitors, you need to make sure that your page is fast to start with (using the other tips in this blog post).

5. Set up lazy load

Lazy load will not only improve your blog performance but will also improve user experience. Lazy load will allow the top of your page to load faster while the rest of the page takes a bit longer to fully load. It works especially well when there is a lot of content on your website. So basically, instead of loading all 10 photos on the page at once, lazy load will have the first visible one to load and then will move onto loading the remaining pictures. Lazy load will help decrease loading time. Plenty of plug-ins have that function. You can use WP-Optimize, WP Rocket, etc.

Here are five easy ways to improve your blog performance and speed without doing any coding or having to know coding. The best way to check your blog speed score is to go on Google Analytics and head over to the left column, then “behavior”, “Site speed” and “speed suggestions”. You can analyze each page one by one and work on each in turn. Google Analytics will also give suggestions that will require better knowledge of a website’s backend but for now, you can focus on the “easy” ones.

There you have my five easy tips to improve your blog performance and speed! Have you tried any of those? Or checked on GA your blog performance score? Have you ever struggled to make your blog faster? Any tips to share with us that were not mentioned here?

Thanks a lot for stopping by. Hope you liked this post.

See you soon,
Love,
Corinne.

*Gifted items.

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5 Comments

    • whatcorinnedid
      Author
      February 2, 2020 / 1:41 am

      Yes, I don’t know if they work on blogger. But considering speed has a huge impact on bounce rate, it’s good to work on improving it!

  1. February 18, 2020 / 3:21 pm

    I minify and compress, but I’ve never combined images. I might have to try that. I have a slightly better than average score on GT Metrix but I am always looking to improve my site speed. Thank you for the suggestions.

    • whatcorinnedid
      Author
      May 20, 2020 / 12:47 pm

      Thank you

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