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Blog readers can be quite impatient. When accessing your blog through search results, Stumbleupon or links to your blog, it is ideal that your entire blog page should load within a few seconds, otherwise such visitors may move on to another site instead.
While you may think your blog loads quickly when viewed on your own computer, you should be aware that your visitors may be using different (and possibly slower) connections to access your pages.
While you may think your blog loads quickly when viewed on your own computer, you should be aware that your visitors may be using different (and possibly slower) connections to access your pages.
The aim of a fast-loading blog is to ensure your pages load in a reasonable time for all connection types.
Those using dial-up will undoubtedly be used to slower page loading times than visitors who have DSL access; however you must also consider that search engine spiders need to access your site and can index pages much more quickly when a site is optimized for speed.
Find out how quickly your site loads
One of the best tools I have found for understanding page loading time is Web Optimization's web page speed report.
This tool is very easy to use: simply type your blog's home page URL into the text box, and hit the "Submit Query" button:
It does take a few minutes to parse the information from your website, though once the page has loaded, you will see loads of useful information about your site.
Now I admit that the information in this page can seem quite intimidating! This service is generally aimed at experienced webmasters who understand the technical details of HTTP requests, external objects and so on. The section we are most interested in is the "Analysis and Recommendations" which will look something like this:
At a glance, we can see which areas of our blogs require some tweaking in order to load more quickly:
- The sections highlighted in green are the areas of the site which have optimal performance, and do not need to be changed.
- The sections highlighted in yellow are not critical, but could be optimized for better loading times.
- Those sections highlighted in red demonstrate areas which really slow down page loading time, and are top of the list for immediate optimization!
If all of these sections display in green and yellow when using this tool, you have little to worry about in regard to your page loading time. However, if you see many red sections you are advised to make some changes to your blog, or potentially lose readers due to excessive loading times!
Ideally, we need to work towards a page loading time of under 8 seconds using a 56k dial-up connection (page loading times will be much faster for DSL and T1 connections).
To achieve this optimal loading time, we need to try to follow these guidelines:
- The overall size of the page should not exceed 80kb
- Use as few external JavaScripts as possible
- Try not to display many images on each page, both in your posts and blog template
- Aim for the smallest file size possible for your images
- Reduce the size of your CSS (style) section wherever possible!
- Make few HTTP requests (in other words, aim to have scripts, images and any other external elements on as few servers as you can!)
This may seem like a lot of work, and if you are new to blogging or web design, it may also seem bewildering! So rather than focus on each factor in great technical detail, I'm going to suggest 6 useful methods you could use to reduce your blog loading time dramatically.
1. Remove any widgets/scripts you don't really need
Unofficial Blogger widgets and JavaScripts can add some great interactive elements to your layout. Unfortunately, each different widget/script you use will need to be referenced from a different server (known as HTTP requests), and will slow down page loading time.
So take a look at all of the widgets and scripts you use in your Blogger layout:
- Do you really need to have each and every single widget?
- Does each widget offer some value to your readers?
- Would your readers really notice (and complain) if you removed a few of these widgets/scripts from your layout?
If you answered "no" to these questions in regard to some of the scripts you use, you should consider removing them from your template altogether.
I know that widgets can help your blog appear more pretty, but consider the impact on your page loading time: you could be losing precious readers if these slow your page down!
2. Try to reduce the amount of images you use in your layout
Loading externally hosted images is another high contribution to your page loading time. So if you use a lot of image-based buttons; feature many image widgets in your sidebar, or use a template which is heavily image based, try cutting down on these to see if this may help your blog load more quickly.
Bonus Tip!
If you really don't want to reduce the number of images you use in your template, you could host these with Blogger instead of an external image host.
To do this, create a new blog post, and upload all of the images you would like to use to this post. These images will then be hosted on one of Blogger's image servers.
Preview your post, and right click on each of these images. You should be able to copy the image location, which you can use to replace the image URLs in your template code.
Using this trick reduces the number of HTTP requests for your images: all of the images you use will be hosted by Blogger, rather than a completely different host. This can have a dramatic impact on your page loading time, especially as Blogger's servers are hosted by Google (which in theory, should be one of the most stable hosts in the world...)
3. Reduce the file size of your images
Another method of reducing the impact of images on page load time is to reduce the file size (not actual size) of all images used (whether in posts or layout).
Many image manipulation programs allow you to optimize images for the web, which reduces the overall file size (in bytes and kilobytes) of the image.
You may also like to try using an online image optimizer to reduce the size of your images. There may be some loss of quality (especially for larger images) but on the other hand, your overall page loading time will be reduced.
4. Simplify your CSS
The CSS section of your Blogger template takes up a lot of the overall file size of your blog pages. This is because each element of your 
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