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How To Make Your Blog Load Faster

Tara Jacobsen — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:31:16 +0000

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…:)

Where should you spend your time?

Tara Jacobsen — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:03:58 +0000

Time is money. I know, it is trite but true! I had a client ask me today if I thought she should spend some of her time on adding her real estate listings to a website. (See my response on Active Rain)

It made me think about what I spend my precious time on. Sometimes I spend time with my friends and favorite clients (good), sometimes I spend it lead generating (good), sometimes I spend it writing blog posts (good) and sometimes I spend it doing something that ultimately does not benefit my business (bad).

When I was an active Realtor I got lots of emails from companies that would “let” me post my listings on their site. They would then sell that feed to other sites who wanted real estate listings. While it did give my listings more exposure, I could have done that all day, everyday, rather than spending my time doing actual things that could sell my listings like contacting other realtors, marketing the home, attending pitch sessions, holding open houses and a million other things besides posting my listings on sites that had no traffic.

Are you doing something that you “could” do rather than stuff you “should” do? DO NOT get me wrong, I am an early adopter who likes to try new marketing efforts BUT if what I am doing does not benefit me dollar for time then I should focus on dollar productive activities and save my energy for things that have a chance of working for me!

A Wicked Case Of Blog Envy!

Tara Jacobsen — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:04:46 +0000

I have been on a mission to make my blog load faster! I have visited other blogs that load faster and I have experienced BLOG ENVY!

Blog envy occurs when you feel like your blog is inadequate compared to everyone else’s blog. When you know your blog is less than perfect it makes you feel like you are living under a big black cloud (OKAY I admit that is a little melodramatic but I have spent the last two days analyzing EVERY square inch of my blog and I believe I have earned the right!)

The way that I knew there was a problem is that I frequently had 100% bounce rate from my google adwords campaigns. The bounce rate is how many times someone comes to your site and stays for less than 10 seconds. When they DID stay they were spending 4-6 MINUTES looking at everything so I knew my content was not driving them away.

I used a great tool on www.websiteoptimization.com to find out how fast my page loaded and if changes that I made reduced the load times. I have reduced the size of my pictures, reduced the number of posts I have on the home page and made sure some of my favorite widgets are not slowing me down (I LOVE Blog Log but if it was the culprit it would have had to go – luckily it is a weensy little widget so it got to stay!!!)

I also talked with my internet buddy Sean today and he said he had done something to his blog and it looked funny on Internet Explorer. He figured that out by checking (he uses Firefox usually), if he had not checked it could have gone on for quite a while before anyone told him.

The moral of the story is that you want to check your site or blog every now and then. Go to different computer and see how your site loads. Use a different browser (if you always use Internet Explorer download Firefox and see how it looks). Make sure you have a way to track your traffic and see if people are staying on your site (Google makes a great Analytics tool that is FREE!)

I am going to move on to other things in my life now (the beagle REALLY has to go out!) and stop obsessing about load times. I am hoping that I can break the habit without a 12 step program!