5 Best Ways To Increase Blog Speed Without Installing External Plugins And Tools

How fast is your blog?

Blogging is all about delivering your best information to a potential customer without getting them worked up. Unfortunately, a lot of blogs in the blogosphere are slow and visitors have to wait for the homepage to load properly. Let me remind you that you’re wasting a lot of marketing efforts. As far as I know, getting traffic to a blog is no longer difficult as it used to be. Why?

There are proven systems that can send avalanche of targeted traffic your way. The only litmus test is what happens to these visitors. Were you able to engage them, convert them into subscribers and repeated customers?

All these are prerequisite steps if you want success in your business. Plugins play a vital role in wordpress blogs. Without them, the entire blog would look like a shapeless organism that would soon die. But when you have plenty of plugins on your blog, it’s bound to slow down your load speed. Instead, I want to show you some simple steps to make your blog load faster without any additional tools.

1. Cascading Style Sheet (CSS)

The first step to speed up your blog speed is to work on the cascading style sheet. This is the sheet that controls the layouts, the color and font used on your blog posts. A lot of free wordpress themes come with crappy style sheets.

It’s left for you to look within the lines and remove any tag and attributes that doesn’t have effect on your blog.

Let me also say this, set your background color to white. A colored background has a way of demeaning the quality of blogs and consequently, reduces the speed. If you are not a web designer, then ensure you get your themes from professionals who would help with style sheet tweaking.

2. Avoid Fancy Flash Headers

Why do people visit your blog in the first instance?

They want information on a particular topic. Your role is to deliver this information as quick as possible or you would lose them. A fancy flash header is usually heavy, because it makes use of pictures, timelines and frames to run the flash video.

If your theme comes with a header and you want to change it, ensure you use a simple self-explanatory header. Stick with 2 – 3 colors that correspond with your hypertext links. The chosen colors have to align with your blog’s theme and portray your image in the foreground.

Instead of using adobe or macromedia flash packages, you should use macromedia fireworks to create your animated header. It would load faster, and you can save it using the popular (gif) extension.

3. Remove Unwanted Widgets

There is no rule of thumb to this, but you should use only the right widgets that visitors would love. On your sidebar, you don’t need 10s of widgets to make success. In fact, few are always better. For beginners to blogging, you don’t need the ads widget on your sidebar. This is because no advertiser is going to pay to advertise on your blog yet.

Your traffic is still minimal and readers are still un-engaged. Experts recommend you start with popular posts widgets, recent posts widgets, category widgets, archives and social media widgets.

Any external widgets would contribute to your blog’s rigidity. Therefore, clear off those unwanted sidebar widgets and make it simple. Focus on quality contents and you would grow your blog easily.

4. Reduce Your Images To Fit

Does an image speak a million words?

Yes, clean photos can mean so much to a blog post. But there is an exception to this. When someone is desperate for solutions, even the prettiest of photos will not answer the question. They need step by step tutorial on how to get a particular need met.

If you must use images on your blog posts, ensure they are minimal.

If you’re an affiliate marketer and has plenty of banner ads on your sidebar, you should consider reducing your post images to 300 X 200 or less. Large images on your blog posts could lead to incessant speed drop on your blog.

Once again, it’s your content that has the solution to problems in your niche. Pictures only help to beautify and trigger readership. Reduce your images to fit your content and put it at the top right for easy reading.

5. Remove Unused Plugins

When my coupon blog went live, I was installing every affiliate plugin I could lay my hands on. I thought I would make more sales on my sittercity coupons and 6pm discount deals offers. I didn’t realize the consequence of doing so. Unfortunately, several bloggers are still in this terrible mistake. In order to increase your blog speed, you need to log in to your wordpress admin dashboard and cross-check your applications.

I’m sure you would discover plugins not in use. You should uninstall and delete these applications to free up space on your PC, and bandwidth transfer.

Marketing Takeaway

There you’ve it, the five exceptional ways to boost your blog speed and retain your targeted visitors. None of the strategies above involve installing external applications and tools, rather you are advised to uninstall.

Getting readers engaged in your blog is the first step to converting them to buyers. Until you do this, none of your marketing activities would to bear tangible fruits. Stick with the above systems and be open to new developments. Have a great day!

Image Credit:lokiv7