How to Improve Website Loading Speed | Speed up Blogger Site
Increase Loading Speed
Now is the time to share the secrets of boosting Blogger page speed score to 100%. As we all know The loading speed of the page/post is now a most critical ranking factor for search engines OR Goole. If you have a page that loads faster than others it will engage users and decrease your bounce rate and stand at the top of the search engine.
Take a look at Free website Speed Checker Tools
There is a check list to improve your page loading speed. Some thing are cited below that I think can be useful foryou inorder to improve page speed.
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Why is Website Speed Important?
Do you know? 40% of visitors decide to leave a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. For e-commerce websites, the figure is even lower. Because 47% consumers expect the website to load in under 2 seconds. 79% of consumers who are dissatisfied with the website's performance will not want to buy from the same website again. Reference
1) Choose Fast Loading Blogger Templates
The first step that you should take inorder to increase you blogger speed is to choose best fast loading paid blogger template. Your loading page speed will automatically be increased.
Is there any Prctical step to do?
Ofcoures Yes. Let's me tell you all aspect one by one ltter on I'll Explore it.
Do you want a good loading score, Then your first step should be to choose a fast-loading Blogger Template to improve your speed score & web page rank.
There are many Free Blogger Templates are availabe with an amazing UI And has page speed 100 out of 100 on both desktop and mobile view.
However i suggest you to choose a premium themes Because these all templates are tested and proven on both desktop and mobile devices. Also they are super fast, responsive and with a best user experiance frontend.
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Page speed is now an official ranking factor and Improving the page speed of a Blogger website is a bit technical and requires a little bit of technical knowledge.
Simple hacks to improve page speed in blogger website.That's why I will show you The step by step process to improve the loading speed of the blogger website.
Remember one thing if you are planning to achieve a 100% score in page speed Insight then that is practically not possible especially when you are using AdSense on your website.
Let’s Understand what is page speed and what are the best SEO practices behind it.
What is Page Speed?
Page speed is often considered as the “page load time” which is the total time takes by a browser to fully load the Contents on a specific page.
Google’s page speed insight considers the overall page loading time whereas other page speed checkers like PageSpeed insights, Pingdom, and GTmetrix consider the “time to first byte” concept while calculating the page speed.
This is the total time taken by the browser to receive the first byte of information from the server to display the above fold content.
You should know that Google’s Pagespeed insights speed score depends upon Two important speed matrices First Contentful Paint (FCP) & DOMContentLoaded (DCL). It also takes data from the Chrome User experience report.
Best Ways to Increase Blog Traffic for Free
- Publish High-Quality Content.
- Be Consistent.
- Publicize Your Content in the Social World.
- Optimize Your Blog for SEO.
- Write Captivating Headlines.
- Start Guest Blogging.
- Repurpose Content.
- Have Patience!
How do I reduce total blocking time on Blogger?
- Here are four actionable steps to optimize the Total Blocking Time of your webpage.
- Minimize the impact of third-party code.
- Cut down the work done by the main thread.
- Reduce the size of Webpage assets.
- Reduces the execution time of JavaScript.
How do I get organic traffic on Blogger?
- How to Use a Blog to Increase Organic Traffic
- Know your target audience.
- Identify keywords.
- Optimize your post around your keyword.
- Create new, quality content.
- Boost your content quality and credibility with links.
- Publish regularly.
Why is page loading speed important for SEO?
As you know Google is now using core web vitals as a ranking signal which includes three important factors given below.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- First Input Delay (FID)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
So, you need to focus on improving these scores. I have prepared a detailed guide on core web vitals so that you can check how it works and how to improve them.
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Do you know One-second delay in page loading speed can cause
- 11% fewer page views
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
- 7% loss in conversions
The ideal time to load a website is 2 seconds or less. In fact, 40% of people hit the back button if a page takes 3 or more seconds.
So, page speed is very important for better ranking along with better conversions.
Steps to speed up a Blogger website
1. Use a Fast loading Blogger theme:
The speed of a Blogger's website mostly depends on the Theme. That’s why you should use a premium lightweight theme on your website.
Pick a theme which is responsive and properly optimized for mobile devices. Free themes are generally not optimized for better speed, that's why it is better to invest in a premium theme.
I have shared some premium blogger themes below that you can use on your blogger website.
2. Optimize your blog Images:
Images generally take up half of your total page size and it is the main cause of slow pages. That’s why you should optimize your images before uploading them to your blog.
As you know Blogger doesn’t have an automated tool for image optimizations. So, you have to manually optimize each and every image of your blog post.
The best image format that is recommended is .webp which provides better compression than .PNG and .JPG formats and it is also specifically designed for web pages.
How to convert images to webp format?
You can convert your images to webp format using a free online tool called Online JPG to WebP converter by https://compress-or-die.com/jpg.
I personally use this tool to convert all my images on the Blogger website and it works perfectly. The compression rate of this tool is very good. It can compress normal PNG images to around 60-65 percent without losing significant quality.
It uses lossy compression which is best for blog websites.
Blogger doesn't support Webp format by default, you have to modify the code a little bit to take the advantage of webp format in blogger. Learn how to use the webp format properly in Blogger.
If you are running an Image website or fashion website where image quality is very important then you should host your images in other cloud storage or Image CDN.
3. Limit the use of custom fonts:
Fonts also take significant page sizes and increase your number of HTTP requests. That’s why I recommend you use at least one font on your website or a maximum of two fonts.
Limit the use of custom fonts in blogger for speed improvement
You can easily know the size of the font of your website by running a page speed test on Pingdom. As you can see in the below image fonts take more than 300KB which can be reduced to below 100 KB if we limit the number of fonts used.
4. Limit the Number of Posts on the Home Page:
To boost the loading speed of your blogger website, you need to limit the number of posts on the homepage. The more posts your homepage has, the more images will require to load, so you should limit it.
You can use expandable buttons for loading more posts on the Home page.
For example, If you go to my Homepage then you will see 8 posts at the beginning, and when you click load more posts it will then load 8 more posts.
How to limit the number of posts on the Blogger website?
Go to your Blogger dashboard and click on the Layout section. Now search for Main posts [Default blog posts] and click on the edit button. Now you will see the option to change the Number of posts on the main page. Change the value and save it.
5. Minimize the Number of Blog Widgets:
The speed of bloggers also depends upon the number of widgets used on the website. So, try to avoid lots of widgets in the sidebar and keep the important ones.
Related Article: VioMagz Blogger Template
Try to keep your blog design clean and simple which will give your readers a better user experience and improve your website loading speed.
6. Minimize Your Third-Party Gadgets:
Third-party gadgets slow down your website speed by more than 20 percent. So, try to limit the number of third-party gadgets and use the most useful ones.
Third-party gadgets like addthis [social share], Disqus [comment], Facebook Page Plugin, and Facebook comment are very much common in every popular theme.
Removing unused third-party gadgets can have a huge performance improvement on your blogger website.
7. Reduce redirects:
You can also improve your blogger blog loading time by reducing redirects of URLs. You can follow some of the best practices to reduce your redirects given below.
- Never link to a page that has multiple redirects in it.
- Avoid plugins/scripts with unnecessary redirection
- Regularly scan your website for old redirects
8. Implement DNS Prefetch in Blogger:
You can use the DNS prefetch technique to speed up your blog loading speed a little bit. Most of the premium themes like Galaxymag, and Freebifycomes with DNS prefetch by default.
What is DNS prefetch and How to implement it on Blogger?
DNS prefetch is a technique to resolve a website’s IP address before a user clicks on its link. It solves the latency issues associated with DNS resolution which can add several seconds to the site’s page load time.
You can easily check if the DNS prefetch is implemented on your blogger theme or not by simply searching for code like <link rel="dns-prefetch" or by running a speed test in page speed insight.
Dns prefetch check for blogger
The syntax of DNS prefetch is like
<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//example.com">
If it is not implemented on your theme then you can easily add it to your blogger theme.
To implement DNS prefetch in the Blogger website just copy the below code and paste it below the head as shown in the below image.
Implement DNS prefetch to speedup Blogger website
Code for DNS prefetch in Blogger
<link href='//fonts.gstatic.com' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//1.bp.blogspot.com' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//2.bp.blogspot.com' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//3.bp.blogspot.com' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//4.bp.blogspot.com' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//www.blogger.com' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//dnjs.cloudflare.com' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//pagead2.googlesyndication.com' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//www.googletagmanager.com' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//www.google-analytics.com' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//connect.facebook.net' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//c.disquscdn.com' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//disqus.com' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//www.w3.org' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//www.youtube.com' rel='dns-prefetch'/><link href='//feeds.feedburner.com' rel='dns-prefetch'/>
You can add more or delete some of the websites in the above code. Just add the most requested websites here.
This will help you reduce the "time to first byte" and improve the page speed score.
9. Use a content distribution network [CDN]:
A content delivery network (CDN) refers to the worldwide distribution of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.
Adding CDN to your blogger website will greatly improve your loading speed as it creates multiple copies of your website and saves them in different locations.
It doesn’t replace traditional web hosting but it helps cache the content at the network level and helps improve website performance.
You can use Cloudflare CDN on your blogger website for free and it will do the job for you. If you don’t know how to connect Blogger with Cloudflare let me know in the comment section.
There are several other benefits of using a CDN it protects your site from DDoS attacks, reduces DNS lookup time, and more.
10.Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML:
One of the common practices for speed improvement is to minify HTML, CSS & javaScript used in websites. There are several techniques to minify these assets one is in the theme level and the other at the server-side level.
Most of the premium Blogger themes come with minified versions of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript which are generally missing in free versions.
That's why try to use a premium version theme on your blogger website. You can also minify these using the Cloudflare account.
To minify HTML, CSS & JS login to your Cloudflare dashboard and click on the speed tab. Now click on Optimization and scroll down to Auto minify. Here tick marks all three items and clicks on save changes.
If you are not using Cloudflare and want to minify the CSS code of your theme then you can use our Free Online CSS minify Tool.
Now run a speed test to check the performance improvement of your blogger website.
11. Use instant Page Script:
You can also speed up your page loading time in Blogger using the instant page script. This is a small code snippet which helps website to load the page faster by preloading the content when a user hover over any internal link.
You can learn more on how to load page faster with instant page script here.
12. Monitor your speed over time:
Monitoring the changes on the page load time is very important, especially adding a new theme, plugins, or script to your blogger website.
You can use several online tools like Google’s page speed insight, GTmetrix, and Pingdom speed test to test your website loading performance.
Here is my latest GTmetrix speed test report which can be further improved by removing the Adsense code and Optimizing all previous Images.
How do I increase page views?
- How to Increase Your Pageviews Per Visitor
- Create great blog content and make sure it is optimized.
- Create evergreen content.
- Creating a great user experience.
- Have a sidebar that promotes related blog content.
- Promote old blog posts (and do a better job at promoting existing content)
How do I fix slow page speed?
- Choose a performance-optimized hosting solution.
- Compress and optimize your images.
- Reduce your redirects.
- Cache your web pages.
- Enable browser caching.
- Use asynchronous and defer loading for your CSS and JavaScript files.
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.