Does your blog load as quickly as you — and your users — would like? or does it take ages to load? Have you ever got frustrated waiting for a slow and sluggish site to load a single page?

In this respect, “first impression really counts”. That’s why it’s important to make sure that your site is loading reasonably fast with less waiting time, otherwise the odds of first-time visitors clicking away is pretty high.

How fast should your site load? According to this article, your site should load in 4 seconds before you start losing your visitors.

If your blog has a less desirable loading time, here’s some possible ways you can do-it-yourself to speed it up. Though it will not make your blog super fast-loading, it should improve it significantly.

5 Possible Ways to Speed Up Your Blog

Before we begin, it’s best that you run a test of your site’s speed with the Website Speed Test or Use Pingdom to get a detailed analysis of your blog’s loading time and performance. Both tools give you pretty good idea of how fast is your blog’s loading time.

1. Optimize Your Images

One of the reason for slow loading site is images, therefore every image should be optimized for web. Simply said, if you are using Photoshop, there is an option to ‘Save for Web’ which you can use to reduce the image size. Alternatively, you can use Online Image Optimizer if Photoshop is not an option.

You also need to ensure that all your images have the proper height and width defined, otherwise the browser will have to determine the size of the image which may slow down its loading.

Example of image code with height and width tags included
<img src="http://www.example.com/logo.jpg" title="My Logo" alt="my logo" border="0" height="230" width="460" />

2. Compress Your CSS

Use CSS Compress WordPress plugin to removes comments, new lines, tabs, and gzip compresses (GZIP) any CSS file called with “”.

Just activating the plugin with the default Kubrick theme will reduce the CSS file from 8k to 1.7k. The plugin will work automatically - you don’t need to do any extra work.

3. Reduce PHP Queries

You might replace the PHP queries with static HTML, every time a page of your site loads, your browser just reads the HTML and reduces the time required to call up the php queries. Here’s 13 Tags to Delete From your Theme to speed up your site’s loading time.

If you think you are comfortable modifying those PHP tags, I strongly suggest that you do backup everything lest you mess it up.

4. A Must-Have Plugin

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates HTML files that are served directly without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

5. Remove Unused Plugins

Lastly, if you have installed and collected a bunch of plugins - or widgets, it is about time that you do some spring cleaning to disable or completely delete those unused plugins - some plugins have tons of script and code, and even create database tables in your WordPress database. It’s best that you only keep those plugins - or widgets that you really need and delete the unnecessary.

I hope the above tips will give you a head start in optimizing your site and improve its loading time which in turn lead to better user experience. If you do have other tips with regard to speeding up your blog, feel free to share it with us here.