Optimizing the loading time of the blog is one of the important factors of search engine optimization, Google loves faster web, if your blog loads quickly then your blog posts get more chances to rank higher in search result. Blog’s loading time depends upon the theme your blog use, how quickly your server responses and the page size. How to check why is your blog loading slowly? Don’t worry, it is a pretty easy job with Google Chrome extension.
Google has developed a useful plugin called “PageSpeed insights” which Is a helpful tool to analyze your blog speed, once done with analyzing your blog, it comes up with an in-depth report which explains why your blog is loading slowly with possible solutions to make your blog load faster. Here is a quick tutor on how to install “PageSpeed insights” plugin to analyze and optimize the loading time of your blog.
How to Analyze your Blog to Find Out Loading Issues?
First let’s know what all the factors making your blog load slowly then we can move to optimizing the blog section.
- First of all lets install PageSpeed insights Chrome extension, download extension
- Now navigate to your blog in Chrome browser
- Right click on your blog and choose inspect element option
- Now go to “PageSpeed” tab and press “Analyze” button
- PageSpeed insights reloads your blog to check the loading time of your blog, it completes the analyzing process in few seconds and display the report.
How to Optimize the Loading Time of Your Blog?
Now you have got the report on why your blog is loading slowly, now let’s fix the common issues you just seen in the PageSpeed insights report. Most common things that PageSpeed insights suggests are server response time, minimize payloads, minify CSS, minify javascript, avoid CSS imports, optimize images and avoid bad requests. So let’s have a look at how to overcome these issues which makes your blog slow.
Choose an Optimized WordPress Theme
Choosing a proper theme for your blog is an important task to optimize the blog speed, the theme you choose should be clean, light weight, responsive and HTML5/CSS3 valid. Try to choose content oriented theme rather giving more importance to style.
- How to Know Which WordPress Theme Does a Blog Use?
- Top 5 Online Tools to Check the Responsiveness of Your Blog
Install Image Optimization Plugin
Image optimizers reduce the size of uploaded images without loss of quality which helps to minimize payloads. There are many free image optimization plugins available for WordPress, here are some popular plugins EWWW Image Optimizer, WP Smush.It, CW Image Optimizer and Imsanity.
Install Caching Plugin
Caching helps to optimize the speed of your blog and is recommended by WordPress too. You get many free caching plugins in WordPress plugin repository, the most popular plugins are W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and Quick Cache.
Give a try to Better WordPress Minify Plugin
Better WordPress minify plugin converts CSS and javascript files to gzip encoding by removing white space and comments. In simple words it reduces the size of CSS and javascript files used by your theme and as a result your website loads faster.
Server Response Time
Server response time is nothing but the time that your server takes to respond to your requests. You should not worry much about this suggestion by PageSpeed insight if you are using a good hosting provider for your blog. In fact you can’t improve server response time yourself, it is up to your hosting provider. The optimizations mentioned above helps to minimize payloads hence the burden on server decreases automatically and as a result the loading time of blog will be optimized.