6 Ways to Speed Up Your Blogger Site

The load time of websites is one of the most
important factors affecting its usability; most
Internet users will just skip a site altogether if it
fails to load within a couple of seconds. Below
you will find the summary of the “Speed Up
Your Site” series. Those are simple yet effective
ways to make sure that your website is running
fast. You can click on each point to read the
article with comments from the readers.
1. Optimize Images: always use the “Save for the
web” feature included on image editing
software. Images represent the heavier load on
virtually any website so make sure you are
optimizing them. Alternatively you can also turn
to an online image optimizer.
2. Image Formats: apart from optimizing images it
is important that you choose the right format.
JPEG format is suitable for photographs or true-
color images. The GIF format should be used
with flat-color images like logos or buttons. PNG
works very similar to GIF but it supports more
colors.
3. Optimize Your CSS: most websites are designed
with CSS nowadays. Make sure to aggregate and
clean your CSS. CleanCSS is an online tool that
will merge similar selectors, remove useless
properties and remove the whitespace from
your code.
4. Use a Slash on Your Links: when a user opens a
link on the form “http://www.domain.com/
about” the server will need to figure what kind
of file or page is contained on that address. If
you include a slash (/) at the end of the link the
server will already know that this is a directory
page, reducing the load time of the site.
5. Use the Height and Width Tags: many people
forget to add the Height and Width tags on
image codes. Those tags will make sure that the
browser knows the size of the image before
loading it. The result is that it will reserve a spot
for the images while loading the rest of the page,
speeding up the whole process.
6. Reduce the HTTP Requests: when opening a web
page every object (images, scripts and the line)
will require a round trip to the server. This
latency can add several seconds to the load time
of your site. Make sure to reduce the number of
objects and to combine CSS files and scripts
together.