Now I realise that this post isn’t directly related to making money but I would definitely argue that this can have an indirect effect on the amount of sales you can get especially in the long term. If your site loads slowly it could turn away visitors never to return which will have an affect in the short and long term. Doesn’t matter how great your content is if no-one stays around long enough to read it. Also Google and other search engines keep an eye on page loading speed; not a close eye but it could still affect your search engine rankings. Plus most importantly it’s annoying for your readers and they are the last people you want to annoy.
To get you started making your load time shorter you first need to know how fast it actually is (other than slow!) and the free tool that i would recommend for that is pingdom.com. This site has a great little tool where you can put in any website and it will tell you how long the page in total loads up as well as how long it takes for individual elements of the page to load up as well. Using this tool means you can get a clear idea of what is going wrong and how to solve it as well as giving you a feeling of achievement through cutting down the load time.
Now you have the problems its time to work on solutions. Before we start however make sure to back-up your blog or website so that if you delete something by accident you can always start over. A good plugin that does this automatically for wordpress is Automatic WordPress Backup v2.0.3. With that done the first thing to do is to have a look through that list and pick out the things that are taking the longest to load and ask yourself if you really need those features. I know it is the nature of every webmaster to keep adding things to their blog or website because more is better but it could be loosing you customers so it’s no good having an amazing video and then no one gets to see it. If you can get rid of it then you should keep things to a minimum. Going with this train of thought you should also have a look at your HTML or CSS or whatever code you use and see if it can be simplified. This means that there is less for the computer to read when it is trying to load up your stuff.
The most common things that you will find are clogging up your site are things like pictures and videos because they are big files so if you can get rid of those then that will be a great help. For things like this also on blogs you may be showing a lot of previous posts that aren’t necessary. If people want to look at your previous posts then give them the option clearly but do they all really need to be shown on the first page?
The next thing specifically for blogs is that widgets have an enormous toll on website load time. Although they make the site look cool they have to be loaded individually which is adding extra seconds on so any of those that you can do without would help.
I know a lot of this post has just been take stuff out of your blog and that may not be what you wanted but that is the best thing to do to cut down load time. There are a few things that you can do though that will help without having to cut anything. The first is to make sure you are hosting all of your own content like pictures. If you are getting them from another website then you are going to have to wait for that other website to get back to yours before it can load and this just takes a little longer so put it on your own web space.
Once you have everything hosted on your own site then you can cut down the time these take to load still further by shortening the command that is needed to show that picture. For example you would normally put the whole domain name in to the code to make it show up. So if you go to http://www.moneyin15minutes.co.uk/125/Profilepicture.jpg then you will find a nice picture of me at a football game but in the widget at the bottom of the page I only put /125/Profilepicture.jpg into the code and it still shows up. This cuts down the amount of http requests that have to go to your server and so makes for better load time.
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