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10 Ways To Make Your Blog Load Faster and Save Bandwidth

This post is part of Saturday, Sunday Series for Newbie Bloggers. You can contact me, if you have any questions.

Sridhar

Q. I have been tweaking my blog to make it load faster, but nothing seems to be helping. And eventhough I don’t have heavy traffic to my blog, often times it goes down 🙁 Can you please suggest me something to over come my problem? Am I missing something or is it normal with all blogs. And I am hosting my blog with basic hosting package, so is that the problem?

To make blog load faster
1. Remove any extra widgets you are using on your blog.- Twitter updates, Facebook fan widget etc
2. If you are running banner ads, make sure you host all the images on your domain.
3. Make less http requests from any webpage.
Ex: Instead of using “http://yourdomainname.com/images/123.jpg” you can use “/images/123.jpg” in the img tag.
4. Use less images. Having one or two images for a article helps, anything more will really slow down the site. Use multiple images only if highly necessary.
5. Move all the CSS and JavaScript codes to an external file. And make sure to optimize them – remove extra spaces, delete the useless codes and make the scripts small and smart(good coding).
6. If you have any badges and banners which does not provide any value to your visitors, then remove it mercilessly.
7. Optimize the images that you are using on your blog.
8. Use Gzip compression. Add the following code to your .htaccess file if your web host have content compression (gzip compression) turned off. You can test it using http compression tool.


# Turn GZip compression on (as per http://tr.im/fnn6)
<Location />
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
# BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
# the above regex won't work. You can use the following
# workaround to get the desired effect:
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</Location>

9. Do not make use of lot of javascript codes to track your visitors. Try to stick only to the necessary things. And do not forget to test your sites performance using Webmasters tool.
Goto Webmasters Tool -> Labs -> Site performance.

Here you can see the performance over view graph and lot more information like: Load time of certain pages from your blog, You can install a 1.5MB add-on to evaluate the performance of your pages and get suggestions on how to improve them, it also reports – what is consuming more time to load and what you can do to improve the performance etc.
10. Above all the speed of the servers where you are hosting your blog is very important – without which any tweaking will go in vain.

Bonus tips:
1. Use only the necessory plugins and remove the rest.
2. Do not use Widgets. Use handcoding and put the things into the WordPress theme directly – reducing the number of calls.

Have a backup of your blog, and if you are comfortable: Use DataBase cleanup plugin, Database optimizer plugin, delete the extra post revisions, use static links – this helps very little, if you already have Gzip compression enabled or Super cache plugin enabled.

Final Thoughts from Matt Cutts:

Hosting
Invest in a good hosting company. See to that you are paying atleast 5 to 6 $ per month for your basic hosting package. If you go far a cheaper web hosting, then the problems are mostly obvious. I suggest going with Doreo host, Blue host, Host Gator, MediaTemple etc. And a basic package is all needed in the initial days.

If you are hosting at a decent hosting company, and still facing this problem, then you must consider evaluating your blogs log files. It contains information about what is consuming the bandwidth. You can mail your hosting company support team and can ask them to check it for you and to report the possible problem. In most cases it would be a plugin problem or a faulty code introduced into the CMS. Or sometimes if you are using some automated scripts to handle some tasks, all these could create some problem, if there are some bugs.

A good hosting company should be able to help you with this – if not, you know, its time to move on. And there are plenty of good web hosts to opt.

Happy Blogging!

20 Tips To Optimize Your HomePage

Everybody talks about optimizing the website as a whole, but it is of equal importance to optimize this single, most important page – HomePage (face of your website).

For almost all the websites, the most ranked and visited page is its homepage. So optimizing it makes a lot of sense. If you feel the same, then continue reading..

Here are some of the aspects that you can tweak, inorder to optimize your homepage:

1. Do not show full article on your homepage. If you are showing 10 full articles on your homepage, then it will take a lot of time to load.
And from users perspective, they may not have the patience to scroll down and digg your website looking for good content. Internet is full of information overload and they may just leave your website and go somewhere else.

On the downside, people need to do an extra click to get to the content, if you start showing post excerpts.

2. If you are showing only excerpts on your homepage, then try to limit it to 8 or 10 post excerpts. If you show 20 to 25 post excerpts on your homepage, then the user experience will again be bad.

3. Use less images on your homepage.: Images consume most of the bandwidth. Images can be used wisely to grab the attention, but if we do not take that extra care to optimize the image, then we will surely have to pay for that latter. It would be better to avoid more images on the homepage.

4. Use less advertisements on your homepage or no advertisement on your home page: The best example for this is Google. Google.com is the simplest and most used search engine in the world and still it doesn’t have a ad on its homepage. Get a clue from it.

5. Optimize all the images that you are showing on your homepage, using some image optimization tools.

6. As far as possible, try avoiding if-else programs on your homepage. Ex:- Showing one ad to facebook visitors and other for Search Engine visitors and another for people coming from Twitter!

7. Remove the widgets and badges from the homepage. Retain only the most important.

8. Avoid animated contents from your homepage, inorder to speedup the load time of your pages and to not divert the attention of your reader, from the beginning.

9. Choose a proper webhost, with good uptime, speed of servers and support.

10. Make use of custom Excerpt option in WordPress and make the excerpts on your homepage more meaningful. Create enthusiasm or the need to read more situation to someone who reads the excerpts on your homepage!

11. You can lessen the ads on the homepage and put link or banner to your own interesting articles or categories of articles. This will give the user more options to navigate. And you can engage your reader for more time, showcasing good articles.

12. Remove the digg, tweetmeme and other buttons from the article excerpts. Show them only on the full post, if necessary.

13. Use labels: Label all the things properly on your homepage. Ex: Recent articles, Popular posts etc, for better user experience. Visitors must not feel, as if they have landed in a wild forest!

14. Test your optimized homepage: Testing is the only way to go. Big internet companies like Google rely only on its continuous testing. But Google, Yahoo, Microsoft has a lot of employees for testing. Now how can you do testing with your website/blog? Most of the times, owner of the blog gets blind to many components on the blog, like, the widgets, labeling, etc. So it is a good practice to arrange a party for your friends(who don’t know about your blog) and tell them to surf and give feed back about 2 or 3 websites(one of which is yours!). Keep doing it once in a while. Do not over do it. You may just endup in testing and may forget the main element of the blog, which is content.

15. Menu bar: Most surfers are used to the menu bar placed at the top, than on the sidebar. So it must be clearly placed in a prominent position and do not mix it with your categories and other stuffs.

16. Show navigation menu or main menu both in the header as well as in the footer.

17. Make sure to have “Popular Articles” or “Recommended Articles” list on the homepage. So that first time visitors know where to look at, for the best contents on your blog. And with the best content, they are more likely to stick to your blog.

18. Show your subscriber count or Twitter follower count as a social proof, if you have some significant numbers.

19. As far as possible avoid flash contents from homepage. You may annoy and drag your readers out of your blog even before they read any of your stuffs!

20. Make your website/blog logo clickable and link it to your homepage.

Please share your optimization tips with us. So that everyone of us can improve our website/blogs.

Technotip.org completed 1 year – Happy Birth Day “SweetHeart”

I am excited. We couldn’t recognize how the time passed. A year back, I had started this blog to share whatever I have learnt about internet. Now with this blog and all you readers and commentators, I have learnt a lot. This motivates me to keep blogging, keep sharing.

I had the plan of starting a blog, and bought the hosting on June 1st[that’s the actual date our blog was live], but on 18th June, it officially got a new, professional design and I took the blog seriously, as a main place for me to stay online.

I am busy with my exams now a days, so we will not be having a blast party here, this time. I am writing this post to thank all the readers of our blog and would like to ask your support for coming years too.
We are committed to provide value to all our readers and we take all your feedback in a constructive manner and would like to improve constantly to make Technotip.org a better place.
thank-you
Please subscribe to our blogs free rss/email updates(if you are not already). And please spread the word about our blog.

Here are some of the articles from our blog with varied topic, which I like to share:-

There are yet many articles to share, but too much is too bad.
(We use to write about health and other non-blogging related topics mostly on Sundays and Saturdays for a change.)

Thanks for everyone who have been supporting us…. If you have any feedback, suggestion, comments, wishes, then please use the below comment section. I am eager to read all your comments.
You can follow me @technotip

Google SMS Channels: Group messaging System

Its a great news for many people in India(2nd largest mobile users). Now we can publish and receive SMS messages from Google SMS Channels.
Google SMS is free for both content publishers as well as mobile phone users who subscribe to text updates via SMS.
We can create a group and send updates to all those who subscribe to our text updates, via SMS. Interestingly, we can integrate our blog using our feed and our SMS subscribers will receive the updates whenever we have a new article in our blog. And subscribers can choose when(time) and the number of SMS’s to be received through Google SMS service.

Presently there are a great variety of groups from most popular GoogleNews Channel to blogs and famous newspapers groups. We can subscribe to all these group’s updates.

We can post an update to our SMS group, using our mobile or directly from the web or automatically from our blog feeds(when there are new articles published).
We need to keep in mind that, our text updates won’t reach our SMS text update subscribers as soon as we publish something, it always arrives to their mobile inbox only at the time they have chosen to receive the updates.

If you are not getting SMS updates, then you need to look at the “settings“ in your Google SMS account.

Hope Google will extend this service to many more countries shortly.

For a complete explanation of this service and a self explanatory help center, click here.

If you are from some other country(other than India), and if this service is available in your country also, then please share some details with us.

Google AdManager is now open to all AdSense a/c holders

Previously Google AdManage was a BETA product and Technotip.org was lucky enough to get an opertunity to try it.
But now, its open to all, if you have an AdSense account, you can sign in to Ad Manager today.

Previously Google AdManage was a BETA product and Technotip.org was lucky enough to get an opportunity to try it.
But now, its open to all, if you have an AdSense account, you can sign in to Ad Manager today.

“A Google AdSense account is a technical requirement for creating an Ad Manager account.”

Its a very good service and you can manage all your advertisers in a well organized manner.

AdManager-Google-AdSense

Google AdManager is used to:

Manage your online ad sales and inventory.
Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad management solution that can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory.
Simple, intuitive user interface: Decrease training time and trafficking steps with simplified tagging and inventory management.
Google serving speed and reliability
Ensure quicker ad delivery and fewer reporting discrepancies.
Significant cost savings!
Pay no I.T. infrastructure, maintenance, or bandwidth costs.

Google AdManager might look like a complex thing to use, but it will be OK once you get used to it. Its all easy. You need to know, the uses of each option and you will be an expert to use Google AdManager.

I am sad for one thing here..i.e., OpenX. OpenX is also a script based software, which almost performs all the functions like Google AdManager, but it will be hosted in our own server and thus it will consume our bandwidth whenever a request is sent to it. On the other hand Google AdManager is hosted in Google’s fast servers.

Just follow the link and signin using your AdSense account…click here.

And for more information about Google AdManager, please visit AdSense blog.