Is your blog or website a big clunky mess that always seems to load slowly? It’s not just you, the load time on your blog can absolutely destroy your “curb appeal” and bring down your blog’s value. After experiencing outages here at theNetFool.com, I’ve decided to switch web hosts. However, there are plenty of tricks you can apply to get some oil back in your site’s gears, and start seeing more traffic.

Suppose you have a brand new house in the hills worth $5k after appraisal. That’s a pretty nice chunk of change, but it just so happens that there is a lot wrong. Maybe you are lazy, maybe you just don’t care, but the outside paint is chipping away and the lawn is dry and full of weeds. It’s amazing how simple curb appeal can tarnish the value of an otherwise great asset. This same story holds true with a webmaster that is running a website covered in weeds. Being on a faulty server or free hosting account is going to bring down the value of your blog. People simply don’t want to wait more than 3 seconds for a website to load anymore, so having the large files, the cheap hosting and the repetitive coding is going to hurt.

Ditch Your Free Web Hosting!
There is a reason why I am switching web hosts. Currently, I’m on a server that has too many users, and goes out all the time (as you’ve probably experienced) as a result. This was okay for starting up, but I’ve put up with it for far too long. Hosting is all relatively cheap nowadays, so I am going to go for that nice 100mbps connection when I choose a web host. It’s a bit amazing how many people will choose based on price, not quality. Speed is important, as you don’t want a car just because it’s shiny… check out the engine first!

Free or cheap-to-a-fault web hosting will catch up with every blogger sooner or later. A few outages, and Google can totally miss indexing you, which is going to hurt your search engine rankings. Loss of visitors from outages or slow performance is probably the single biggest toll. Again, the majority of readers don’t like to stick around to see a massive blog load all the way through. Discounted hosts can be a death sentence for an aspiring webmaster, but there are many good deals out there. I recommend: Host Gator, 1and1.com, GoDaddy.com, BlueHost.com and DreamHost. With current deals out there, nobody pays sticker price. I could get a 2-year “Baby” plan at Host Gator down from $214.80 to $121.84 by applying a 20%-off coupon and buying a package through my own affiliate link.

Test Your Website’s Speed Now!
There’s a lot you can do outside of switching hosts to speed things up on your website. Simple optimization techniques can make an enormous impact to how fast your blog will appear. iWebTool’s Speed Test is my favorite, so go ahead and enter in your blog along with some professional website’s that you’d like to match. Chances are, you can see some big improvement just by taking some simple steps… so let’s work on getting you “up to speed” (oh man, please excuse my humor).

Optimize Your Images
The single most important step in tweaking your website’s speed is to optimize your images. With Adobe Photoshop, it’s pretty easy to get high-quality images that look identical to the big master files, though there are plenty of other programs that can do the same. Try the Online Image Optimizer or JPEG Wizard for free optimization on the internet!

There’s a big debate as to which image types are the best to use: GIF, JPG or PNG I’m a sucker for the ultra-low file size offered by JPG images, but it’s recommended to only use the extension for photos. GIF and PNG are great for web-images (like navigation bars and spacers), so what you choose is up to you. Never, and I mean never, put a BMP file up on your website.

Typically speaking, images are the bulk of the loading process. If you can cut the size of your images in half, you are going to see a dramatic boost in your page load time. All the images in my blog posts are set to 60%-70% JPG quality… so clearly you don’t need perfection to entertain your visitors.

Optimizing Your Coding/Content
There are thousands of tips and tricks that people swear by in juicing up the speed of a website with coding. I’m not going to waste your time on petty things that don’t show up in the end-result… so let’s hit the top five ways to speed up your website:

1. Use CSS (cascading style sheets) for your designs
   - Adding a CSS style is an effective way to load images and work to reduce repetitive code in your template. Having things set up in an external .css file can be the best way to jump-start your blog. Check out this free CSS cleaning tool.
2. Enter image size proportions (height & width) in your code
   - A lot of people simply forget to add the height and width tags to their images. By having “<img src=”x.jpg” />”, you are forcing your server to do extra work to figure out the size. Why not tell it from the get-go what you want? “<img height=”5″ width=”20″ src=”x.jpg” />” is a lot more efficient and will load your website much quicker.
3. Use external scripts, don’t try to pack it all in!
   - Never try to include all of your scripts in the coding on one file. It’s much better to save all of your scripts individual, and link them in later so that they can be cached in the browser for faster speeds. If you are using the same script over and over, why not load it from one spot?
4. Use a backslash in your links
   - List all of your links with a backslash “http://www.thenetfool.com/”. Without the slash, you are making the server figure out whether this is a file name, a whosee or a whatsit… when all you want is the directory!
5. Avoid “tables” and repetitive html code
   - If your website is contained in one big “<table>” tag, be wary. Websites generally won’t load until the server processes the whole chunk of code inside. Instead, try cutting things up into smaller tables, or use “<div>” to clean it up.

With these tricks in hand, you can significantly improve the loading time of your website. You’d be surprised what some simple organization can do to your speeds… and your traffic will jump as a result!

Are Your “Caching” all this?
If you want to have your whole website run a lot more efficiently, why not experiment with a WordPress plugin like “WP Super Cache” or “WP Cache” to load all of your files quicker from the get-go? Cache services like these can help initial downloads load faster from your server. In addition, people viewing multiple pages are going to see much better performance if things on your website are being cached in their browser effectively.

The plugins mentioned above attempt to do many methods of caching all at once. If you’d like a more exact process, check out this great cache guide from arnebrachhold.de. Using a cache to have your files more easily manipulated is a popular movement, as is using .gzip compression to mash down the file sizes of your content. As far as compression goes, a lot of that is technical mumbo-jumbo that I don’t want to five into. If you are interested in .gzip, check out this reference guide!

Bottom Line: Why settle for a $5k house, when with a few updates (faster loading speeds) you can have a full $1 million? I’m a current offender of this rule, which is why I am electing to upgrade to a faster web host. Try experimenting with optimized images and optimized coding to get your blog running faster and more efficient than ever before, and keep your visitors happy!

-The Net Fool

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