12 Effective Tips To Reduce Blog Page Load Time

Blog loading time can dramatically impact your website ranking and conversion.

Google considers website’s loading speed as a ranking factor and that is why it is important that we should work to reduce our website and blog loading time.

If you are on blogger you hardly notice any downtime and blog slow-downs but WordPress bloggers have one thing to worry about blog loading time.

So, in this post I am sharing some tips and tricks to enhance your blog loading time.

Did you know that if an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a delay of 1 second page load time can cost it a yearly loss of $2.5 million? Research also has it that 47% of the readers expect that the websites should load within 2 seconds while a delay of more than 3 seconds can make 40% of your readers to abandon your site.

So, here are some of the best ways to optimize blog loading time and get blazing fast blogs.

1) Remove unwanted plugins:

WordPress users have an advantage over blogger blogs due to the fact there are millions of plugins which help them do things they can never imagine doing on blogger or WordPress.com blogs. But sometimes advantages can be the reason of one’s undoing.

Many of us install way too many plugins that eat up a lot of our server resources and render our blog slow. Here are some tips you should keep in mind while using WordPress plugins:

  a. Disable unwanted plugins:

Try uninstalling plugins like blogger importer (if you have ever imported your blog from blogger to WordPress you tend to have forgotten to uninstall this), All in one favicon (try uploading the favicon into the theme), too many social share plugins, Pinterest pin it plugin (you can use the shareahoilc plugin that has a pin it button for images by default).

  b.Use a single plugin doing the task that requires a bunch of plugins:

Many of us use different plugins like one for sharing, one for creating a mobile version of our site and lots more. I suggest using jetpack plugin to do them seamlessly. Another example is you can stop using separate analytics, sitemap and SEO plugins by using the yoast plugin that has all these functionality.

2) Use a better host:

Self-hosted WordPress blogs have an advantage of choosing their own web host. When it comes to hosting your site you would never want to host on a server that is crappy with no or poor support.

For small size blogs, I recommend using Hostgator or Bluehost. But if you are looking for a professional hosting which can dramatically decrease your loading time, then I recommend you to go with WPXHosting (This blog BloggerTipsTricks.com is also hosted on WPX).

3) Invest in a better theme:

If you built a brick and mortar shop or service store would you use cheap material to construct it? I guess I heard a firm NO. Well, that’s the case of our blogs too. They are your stores on the internet where you provide service, information and help to your customers.

If you are even a percent serious on blogging, you would never want to risk your blog with a free theme. Free themes are not only poorly coded but also have tons of malicious codes in them that could enable the distributors to even hack your blog.

Now, what if I told you certain paid themes are also poorly coded and not useful? That is why I prefer Genesis themes from studiopress. They are the most professionally designed, SEO-optimized, secure and fast loading themes.

Check out my personal review of genesis framework and its themes.

4) Optimize your images:

Many times we upload images as we find them on the stock photos sites. Though it is said that images increase the visual appeal of the blog, but we should be aware that they can dramatically increase the loading time of your blog.

For this, we have a workaround. You can upload the images to your WordPress gallery after optimizing them. Here is how to do it:
Decrease the size of the images using smush it plugin. Smush it is a service from Yahoo that is used to compress images without losing the quality of the image.
If you have png files to be uploaded I prefer TinyPNG that is the best tool to compress the images without the loss of quality.
Use the WordPress plugin called lazy load that will conditionally load images when the reader scrolls to the bottom of the blog rather than load all the images at once. This way you get a lot of time to load images without affecting the quality of user experience.

5) Use a CDN:

A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of web servers that are distributed across the countries and help in delivering content more efficiently. They are more efficient than a single server that delivers the content to the whole world. If you want to get a clear idea let me explain.

Suppose you have pizzas in your kitchen and your friends are seated at different rooms in a horizontal apartment. If you wanted to take and deliver one pizza at a time what time would you take?

In the second case, you have pizzas at the door point of each room and now you have to just go near each room take a pizza and reach to the table of your friend. This is easier and faster than going each time to the remote kitchen and delivering pizzas one at a time.

6) Get your codes minified:

When you do an analysis of your page speed with Pingdom or any other tool they show you what element on your site took how much time.

You can then clearly see that certain HTML codes including your flashy social subscribers widgets, CDATA sections, and other java scripts take significant time to load. Sometimes your theme might also contain certain CSS elements that are not really necessary. You should remove all these elements.

You can use the plugin called autoptimize in WordPress to compress your CSS and HTML elements. There is an online tool called minifier for non-WordPress users too.

7) Do not show too many posts on your homepage:

Most themes have the option to limit the number of posts displayed at the homepage. Do limit yours at 7 or at the most 10. I wouldn’t suggest you infinite scroll (used to load every post on the homepage) if you really want your website to load faster.

You can go to Settings > Reading in your WordPress dashboard and set the required number there.

8) Do not use JavaScripts at the top of your blog:

Having java scripts like the social flows from twitter or Google plus can be a huge factor to increase your blog loading time. You can put your JavaScripts like the Google analytics code in the footer section which will make your blog load faster by itself loading after all your content has been displayed.

If you are using Genesis theme, then go to Genesis options and paste your JavaScript codes in the footer area.

9) Don’t use too many advertisements:

Using ads for monetizing a blog is too common these days. But beware your ad banners and GIF images might be the cause of slow loading of your blog. Use very less number of banners again each compressed with the techniques I mentioned above.

Even Google AdSense offers you to use your ads in asynchronous format that will not hamper the loading of your blog. Use them instead of the synchronous format of ads.

10) Reduce the clutter off your server:

If your site is probably a year old or so you are sure to have injected codes and scripts that were necessary then but are now totally obsolete. Sometimes certain plugins that were a must use then are now not necessary to the minimum.

For example: Many or almost all of us used codes to show Google authorship to our posts. Now that is officially abandoned you should take time and remove it. Many must have used plugins to set Google authorship if you are one amongst them, remove it.

Old sites often have too many backups clogged into their server. If you have too many backups eating up your favourite server juices why not delete them to keep only the latest one or two. This will surely free up your system resources to make your site load smoother.

11) Speed up the most viewed pages:

Every site has some of the pages viewed more than the others. You can check your most viewed pages from the Google analytics and then optimize them to load faster.

Here’s how to do it:

Remove the number of ads on the page: Unless you are making a noticeable hefty sum from those ads why would you want to toll on the UX of the pages?
Optimize the images: By any of the techniques I mentioned above.
By hiding certain elements on the sidebar that are not so necessary.

12) Use a caching plugin at your end:

Sometimes using a caching plugin on your end, i.e. at your dashboard can be useful. I prefer W3 total cache that will help reduces the loading time significantly.

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Learn How To Use SEMrush For Keyword Research (30-day Free Trial Inside)

Keyword research is one of the best ways to understand what your readers want and then decide how you can provide value for them through your articles.
Blog posts that target a primary keyword has more chances to get more traffic, leads and sales.
However, choosing the perfect keyword isn’t easy.
You need to perform keyword research to find the right keywords with right intent and even more importantly, profitable keywords with good search volume. In today’s article, I will show you how to do keyword research with SEMrush, take the maximum advantage of this SEO tool and also a 30-day free trial coupon so that you can use SEMrush to your heart’s content without having to worry about paying.

Getting Started with Keyword Overview

To get started with SEMrush, you have to sign in for a free account here. 

After you login to the SEMrush dashboard, click on the overview tab under the keyword analytics options (on the left hand sidebar).

You’ll find a search bar in the next screen where you need to enter your broad topic of which you want to find keywords. You can also select the country (which I highly recommend) for which you are targeting the keyword or preferring an audience of.
For this particular example, I chose the keyword indoor plants. After all is said and done you’ll have a result page as follows.

In the above screen, you can see 4 different reports for my preferred parent keyword “indoor plants”. Let me explain them to you:

1. Organic Search:

It gives you an idea of how many people actually search for the keyword in Google (22.2K in this example) and how many web pages are ranking for that term (28.7M). That’s pretty tough (but we will see how to tackle such tough keywords in some time

2. Paid Search:

This part reveals if any websites or brands are bidding for that term using paid ads.
And what is the average cost per click, in case you wanted to bid for the term too.

3. CPC Distribution:

This section shows the average CPC based on country you would target.

4. Trend:

This is something interesting and a key factor to analyze. It shows you the monthly distribution of your target keyword and hence you know if a keyword will bring you traffic all the year round or only on specific months (example, Halloween costumes).
This basic info is important to give you an insight of what elephant you are rearing as your keyword. But, you shouldn’t just shoot for these keywords, that would be foolish.

EDITOR’S TIPS

You can also use the “overview” option to research and find 5-6 key topics around your blog.
These topics can be used as your broad categories. If you already have broad categories, use the above option to research more about your category topics.
The search trend in them and how SERPs are changing with time. This will help you to build a relevancy score for your blog which can help you build authority.
Phrase Match and Related Keywords
Right below the keywords overview tab, you’ll find option for phrase match and related keywords.This is where the most technical keyword research happens.

What we did in the first phase was actually find a few parent keywords which could form the pillar of our content strategy.
Targeting them or any similar parent keywords is nearly impossible, not at least if you’re just starting.
For that, you have to find the low-hanging fruits (keywords that have very less competition) and leverage them to first build a strong ranking profile for your blog.


EDITOR’S TIPS


We are targeting low competition keywords because they are often left abandoned by authority sites who already have the resources to rank for much broader and profitable keywords.
Hence they mostly don’t target or rather optimize their content for keywords with very less search volume like 60 searches per month (country specific) or even 20 searches per month.

Aren’t we wasting our time by concentrating on something not fruitful?

Not at all.

In fact these low-hanging keywords are easier to rank because you have dedicated blog posts for these unlike the authority sites.This way, you have far more chances of ranking and thus more click-through rates in the SERPs.
Eventually these blog posts will also rank for a ton of LSI keywords which will bring more cumulative traffic.

How to Use SEMrush Phrase Match Option for Keyword Research?

Phrase match is a great option when you know you have a product or topic to target but it is too broad. Phrase match gives you the option to find all possible keywords that are closely related (have the exact phrase you searched) to your target keywords along with alternative words.
You can also use phrase match to find long tail keywords and alternatives to product names (alternative terms used by users to search a product).

In the above image, you can clearly see two profitable keywords with good buyer intent.
This is only half the screenshot, if you actually search it has 2,641 keywords that match your target
keyword.


EDITOR’S TIPS


I would say even the two keywords I selected inside say just half of the story, use these keywords (indoor plant stands, grow light for indoor plants) and enter them separately again as you did to the parent keyword to reveal for easier to rank long tail keywords.

How to Use SEMrush Related Keywords Option?

Are you working on a niche you don’t have any idea of?

Many times we come across a keyword that we’d like to rank for but we don’t have any idea for related keywords to write next. With related keywords, you can easily enter a specific keyword and find all related keywords that might not have the same terms but belong to the same industry.
This time I entered a keyword as vague as “shoes”.
To be honest this is a keyword that is literally impossible to rank and maybe unprofitable too.
But, suppose you thought of working in the shoe niche but you have absolutely no idea about this niche.
This is where Google’s related searches also fail because they will only show you closely knit related searches like shoes for men and shoes online shopping.
To actually save time, digging deeper, you can use SEMrush’s related search feature which easily unlocked me to many keywords like orange coral shoes, gold women sneakers, all black womens tennis shoes, etc.
You could rinse and repeat the same procedure to further refine into more keywords worth targeting.
Now that you found keyword these keywords, I’d suggest to use the same rinse and repeat formula with these to uncover more related keywords to your key topics.

How to Use SEMrush Keyword Difficulty Tool?

Imagine you found a keyword (shoes) with 673,000 searches per month.
Isn’t that the ultimate zen thing to happen for your content strategy?
Wrong?
Most keywords already have content published around them (I hope you know internet’s been there
from a long time and much before you’re a blogger).
Often times, these keywords have brands or high authority sites ranking for them.
You wouldn’t even want to mess with their keywords because, well, this is nearly impossible to achieve.
That is why keyword research tools are used to give you an idea of how easy or difficult a keyword is to rank.
These tools use a lot of data like ranking domains’ DA, PA, backlinks, social shares, word count, trust and citation flow based on the tool you’re using.


EDITOR’S TIPS


Most tools are machine algorithms after all.
They do give you an idea (which is correct most of the time) but do not guarantee their accuracy.
This is a matter with every keyword research tool out there, leave alone SEMrush.
So, it is always good to use these tools to get an idea of the game and then perform a check of your own manually.
I have written guiding you how to do that, here.
The keyword difficulty tool shows you a count from 1-100% in which a count higher than 1 towards 100 shows the increasing difficulty of the keyword to rank where 100 is next to impossible to rank for.

SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool

SEMrush’s keyword magic tool is an all in one yet more feature-rich and advanced keyword research tool where you can literally enter a single worded keyword tool and build an entire empire of related long tail keywords to rank for.
With the keyword magic tool, you can enter a single word and then find the most related terms along with their keyword details under one tab.
You can then select these keywords (by pressing the + button) to dump them into the advanced keyword analyzer tool.
Check the image below:

After you’ve done that, you can now refresh the stats in the keyword analyzer to find detailed stats for each keyword like the keyword difficulty, click data, estimated search volume and the top competitors that are already ranking for the terms.

This is all you need to have a bird’s eye view over your whole keyword bucket. Now select the ones that are the most relevant to your content strategy and use them accordingly.

Remember

Our aim with these tutorials is to help you start stronger and win your blogging game. And no, we don’t want you to spend a dime on keyword research or any such thing from day 1.
That is why, we have partnered with SEMrush to bring you a 30-day free trial coupon so that you can use it to find a year full of blog posts and keyword ideas.

Get Started Now (for Free)

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