Over the past couple of days I laid out a challenge to my Twitter followers. The challenge:
Does Your Blog Load Faster Than My Blog?
After two days I am still yet to find anyone who has a blog that loads faster than mine.
While running the challenge I received a tweet from Melissa Reyes (follow her) asking me how I made my blog so fast:
@davidshawblog You’re right. Your blog loads 34% faster than mine (and I thought mine was fast). Damn. What are your “tricks”?
So, how did I get my blog so fast?
The truth is that I don’t have any special secret to making my blog super fast. The factor that I think is most important is that I only install plugins and features that I feel are neccessary.
It is very easy to get sucked in and install a whole wealth of plugins and most get put on and then forgotten about. I only install plugins that provide a purpose on my blog, if they offer no value then they get removed. Too many plugins is one of the most common factors for a slow blog.
I also don’t use an image heavy theme, my blog is very clean and has very few resources that have to be downloaded by my visitors, at the end of the day the content is the most important thing to my readers so I try not to distract them to much with unnecessary images.
Plugins. I only use two plugins to help improve the speed of my site, they are WP-cache and WP Smush.it. WP-cache creates static versions of my blogs pages and serves them to visitors instead of rendering the page for every visitor, this is great for reducing your blogs bandwidth.
WP Smush.it is a tool that you can use to compress the size of images on your blog. I always like to include images in my blog posts and this plugin allows me to optimize them to keep my blog nice and speedy.
Ad Code. I currently only run Puxee ads on my blog, these are mega fast so they don’t slow down my blog. Networks such as Adsense however are not so fast and can cause your blog to slow down in order to load the ads. Try and keep ads to a minimum, if you are using them make sure you are using a fast network.
Hosting. I use a well respected blog host called Hostgator and can honestly say I have never had a problem with them in the 6 years that I have been with them. I also believe that using a large well known host such as them is helping to speed up my blog as their servers are speedy and secure.
At the moment you can get 25% off with Hostgator if you sign up with the code ‘newblogger25′, so if you are looking to get a reliable and fast web host then I suggest you give them a go.
There you go, those are the ‘tricks’ that I use to make my blog super speedy.
So to continue the challenge:
Does Your Blog Load Faster Than My Blog?
Want to get involved and see if your blog is faster than mine? Take a speed test on http://whichloadsfaster.com put in your url on one side and mine on the other, at the top you will see a link for ‘repeat’, choose one of the options then race.
Share your results below, I am interested to see if anyone has a faster blog than me!
Receive all the latest Blogging, SEO and Social Media news directly to your inbox.
{ 11 comments }
Twitter: socialamateur
June 8, 2011 at 12:42 am
Nice tips! There are few things that turn readers off more than a terribly slow site. You are right that at the end of the day, the strength of a site is based on the quality of content, not all the fancy design and add-ons. Still, I’m a designer at heart, and first impressions matter. It is a balance, and I think both of our sites do it well. Even if yours is a little faster!
Thanks for the mention/link!
Twitter: newbizblogger
June 8, 2011 at 2:27 am
OK, I confess… I am the plugin Queen! You don’t even want to know how many plugins I’m running. I have been trying as of lately to hard-code things if I can, but it’s a work in progress.
Congrats on the speedy site. Me on the other hand, back to the drawing board. LOL
Michele Welch recently posted..5 Top-Notch Survey Tools For Powerful Marketing Research
Twitter: hupseymedia
June 8, 2011 at 7:48 am
My blog probably loads slower.. I use a lot of plugins and images. I use total cache to speed it up, and javascript to footer.
I see the javascript to footer helps, beacause the scripts dont start before the whole page is loaded.
Most of my plugins are not that recorce demanding, and the slowes are placed in the sidebar and footer. I could get rid of some of the facbook and twitter
badges, but I think they can help on my social promotion..
Twitter: ditesco
June 8, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Alright, Michele is the plugin Queen and I am the “freakazoid” King. Love plugins as I am not a coder and makes my life easier. I agree however that having so much “stuff” does hamper your sites performance and this is one of the reasons why I am using CloudFlare’s free CDN service to balance the effect
I took the challenge and did a 2X repeat par on par with yours.. Bah, I lost, lol. Your site loaded in almost 2 secs flat an mine 2.6 (which is not bad considering). Solid tips David.. Liked the touch of only using “Puxee”
DiTesco recently posted..How To Manage Multiple WordPress Sites And Increase Earning Potential
Twitter: davidshawblog
June 8, 2011 at 8:39 pm
Yup.
Does show how fast our ad code is though.
I am trying to get mine down to under a second.
Twitter: berget
June 9, 2011 at 7:55 am
I’m definitively going to install your two plugins to help my blog load faster. Mine is way too slow.
Great tips David.
Jens P. Berget recently posted..You don’t have to be Jerry Seinfeld to be running a kick-ass business
Twitter: berget
June 9, 2011 at 8:02 am
David,
I have just installed the wp-cache, and would really be interested to hear if you have done anything to the settings other than the default? For instance, have you added more files to be cached?
Jens P. Berget recently posted..You don’t have to be Jerry Seinfeld to be running a kick-ass business
Twitter: inkshark
June 10, 2011 at 7:11 pm
Hey David,
Yep, your blog just smoked mine in the test and I’m running the same plugins..lol. I’m sure it’s my ads that are the main slowdown. Also your running Thesis which is out of the box faster then my current theme. Grats.
Good Stuff,
Tony Milano
Tony Milano recently posted..I Give You Permission To Succeed
Twitter: davidshawblog
June 11, 2011 at 11:29 am
Looks like you need to make the move to Puxee.com with your ads then!
Twitter: moremoocom
July 4, 2011 at 4:42 pm
Nice tips David, my blog is loading quite slow the reason might be too many plugins that I even don’t remember what they suppose to do. So I guess I will go through them one by one and keep only those which really bring some value.
I will also check the plugins you mentioned.
Thanks for this info!
Twitter: ProfitDuck
July 26, 2011 at 3:06 pm
Thanks for the insights into keeping your blog speedy. I tend not to install anything which i don’t feel is needed, I probably have a couple which i don’t need, but after every week or something of having these plugins they tend to get uninstalled.
I think the main thing that lets me down in my host, problem is I never get around to changing it. Especially as one of my domains is on it, so I would lose it, luckily not an important one in use, but makes some money. Rookie mistake!
Regards,
Simon Duck