How to Make Your Blog Load Faster

The speed at which your blog loads is critical to attracting more readers to your blog. If your blog takes a long time to load, many readers may leave your blog before they have the chance to read it.

Here are a few tips and tricks that will help your blog load faster and attract more users:

Posts

Your blog's load time can be affected by the number of posts you display on your main page. You can easily edit the number of posts displayed on the main page from the Settings | Posts and Comments tab. You can then select the number of posts you want to display on the main page. Google's Blogger recommends displaying 10 or fewer posts on the main page.

Third Party JavaScript and Links

For optimal blog load speed, Blogger recommends using its widgets, JavaScript and links. However, if you must use third party JavaScript and links, your blog will load much faster if you put all JavaScripts at the bottom of your blog. If you must have third party JavaScript and links in your sidebar, then put them at the bottom of the sidebar.

Images and Media

The more images, videos and other multi-media you have on your blog the longer it will take to load. However, images and other multimedia are important to attracting users to your blog, so it is important to optimize the load speed of your images and media.

Below is a slideshow of how to embed images you have already uploaded to Picasa Web Albums (now called Google Album Archive) into your blog:

To learn even more ways Google products work together, you may want to visit the official Google Support.

Here are a few tips to increase the load speed of your media:

• Decrease the size of your images or use thumbnails that link to the full-size image.
• If you use third party images, consider uploading them to Picasa Web Albums via the Blogger post editor.
• If you have a large number of images to display, you can upload all your images (from a vacation or event) to a Picasa Web Album and link to the album in your post or sidebar.

Other suggestions

• If you've added any custom CSS to your blog, make sure you put it at the top of the page.
• The most important content of your blog that catches readers attention should load the quickest. To help you identify which items are taking the longest to load you can use Stopwatch. To use Stopwatch, enter your blog's URL into the text box and click "Start StopWatch". Stopwatch will then open your blog in a frame and will record the time it takes for everything on your blog to load, including images, videos, widgets, etc. Take note of the items that take the longest to load and modify them appropriately using the suggestions above.

Good luck, and happy blogging!