Optimizing Page Load Speed

One of the important things to remember when designing your website is their file size. The size of the page determines how fast it loads on the visitor's browser. Expecting your visitors to wait until the page loads is just wishful thinking. The visitor will likely leave your site before they wait on the page to load. You have to keep in mind what may load fine for you may not for your visitor. The users bandwidth speed and computer may be slow, resulting in a longer waiting time.

Personal Note: I am a member of Blogger Help Forums.  If I am trying to help a user out and have my browser crash or lag because of the users blog. Then that users will likely not be getting help from me. The worse part about it is Blogger allows 500 post to display on the homepage. But yet users are still complaining, saying "that is not enough". Anyways....

Another important factor in having a small page size is the issue with web crawlers. Web crawlers have problems properly indexing a heavy page. This leaving your site harder to find on search engines.
 
Check Your Page Size!

The most important page to optimize is your homepage.  Most visitors come in on this page so it is smart to keep this page to the minimum size. It is said a great web page should be 32kb or less. However this is almost a impossible size to aim for. But a good example of a well optimized site is Googles homepage. This page is only 10-15kb in size. Don't expect to match that size on your site. The size you should aim for is around 50kb and believe it or not that is a hard task to accomplish. My homepage when I wrote this post was at 59kb, but in my opinion this is still a good size. I would say aim for anything between 50-100kb depending on what your site is about.

When you Check Your Page Size your looking for the size and not the load speed. The load speed of that test is not taking into account the users computer and connection speed.  So instead you should be more concerned with the size. For most the blogs I have seen, many of you are probably breaking 100kb on your homepage.

Before we get into optimizing your pages I would like to go over what types of things will make your page heavy.

• Images displayed (This includes your background image)
• Anything included (JavaScript (.js), or External Sheets (.css),
• Videos or slide shows
• Ads or flashing banners
• Music player (especially if they are auto play)
• To many post displaying
• Unnecessary HTML tags

The biggest problem is with the images because users like to post these in every post. If you have looked through my blog then you have noticed that I rarely post images and that is why. However I'm not saying to not post images! You just need to optimize your images first. You may lose a little quality when doing this but its best for those who love to post images.

Image Optimizer

The link above is a great tool to optimize your images before you add them to your blog. This tool is a safe download and lets you trim away the excess KB's from the image with little or no loss of quality. All background images Blogger uses in the Template Designer have already been optimized.
Note: Only use .png  formatted images when you have the need for a transparent images.

A lot of users like to use 3rd party gadget or script from other sites. Beside their being a danger because you really don't know what your getting with these script, their is also another problem. These scripts have to access a server outside of Google (Most cases) to retrieve the data to use. This cutting down on you load speed. So if possible try to use the minimum amount of external scripts. Keep in mind videos, ads,  and music player all have external scripts in them

Videos and music players are a problem on your homepage. It is best to avoid placing these on a homepage if possible. I am sure everyone has waited on a video or music player to load at some point in time. It is a pain to say the least. I would not suggest posting videos to your homepage at all. In your post pages try to never have more then 3 videos on the same page.  Even this is over doing it! As for music players, you can put them on your homepage. Just never have auto play on. The best thing to do is to placing them in a Hide/Show Content script set to hide by default.

Everyone like money and wants more of it. But placing to many ads on a page is not the way to go. Your page will load slower resulting in less impressions. Luckily AdSense will only allow 3 ads on a page at one time. But if your using some other types of ads then make sure you don't use to many ads.