So I am on a mission (again) to try and make my webpages load faster. Sigh.
It is vital that you have a fast website so that when you generate traffic don’t lose them before they even have a chance to know how great your site is! I am going to be doing A LOT of marketing my site in the coming weeks and want to make sure I put the best site forward!
The first thing I did was analyze how fast my site was to start (I like The Website Optimization Site) It told me that I had a lot of objects and to try and combine them, so I did.
Then I made my beautiful header images smaller by reducing the quality of the graphics. Then I took off the My Blog Widget (I know – it is back! It literally reduced the load times by one-hundreths of a second so I kept it!!!). Then I took off the “archives” section as it was just by months and didn’t seem helpful anyways. I made all the sidebar items on the right in one textbox instead of having 5.
And I reduced the load time of my site from 7.68 seconds to 7.49 seconds. Sigh.
The last thing I am trying is to see if I can be a little smart about this. I have two HUGE posts that are showing on the homepage right now (how-to’s with graphics and BIG links). I am going to check and see if I can make a difference by having a post with more text and less graphics. If that is the case I will try to alternate between graphic heavy posts and “plain” posts like this one. On a side note, I already have limited the number of posts that display to 3 which helped the load times greatly the last time I was on this bender!
UPDATE – I have achieved sub 7 second scores! I hit 6.9 seconds. I guess almost a second is okay, not fabulous but better than nothing!!!
UPDATE TO THE UPDATE – I got down to 5.96 by deactivating the plugins that I was not using. I have a couple, like CommentLuv that are frivolous but I like them too and I am keeping them…:)
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