It should be utmost priority to reduce the load time of any site. Slower the website bigger the risk of turning site visitor frustrated and wondering and ultimately loosing them. Even some search engines while indexing timeout a site once it fails to load within specified time.
The most important step in reducing the load time is identifying the causes first. The website or blog constitute of different elements like scripts, widgets, images, videos, animations, etc. each of this can tremendously increase or decrease your webpage load time.
Lets look at each of these categories in detail
#1. Scripts –
The bigger and complex the script the more time it will take to load and hence increased time to show the effect on your blog.
Try to trim script size, look for alternatives or store it on server with relatively higher speed.
#2. Widgets –
Widgets again contribute enormously to load time, it depends on widget source site, size and content of widget. For example: widget from some external site displaying feed content for some third site can take considerable time to load, again some flashy widget can add up to load.
#3. Images –
Images or pictures in site increase the page size tremendously, few tweaks like replacing all .bmp with .jpg or .jpeg can be of great use.
#4. Videos –
Some embedded videos consume considerable amount of flash to load and hence increase in site load time.
#5. Animations –
Animations are always no-no for any site or blog, they tend to distract your visitor attention away from all so important site content. As far as possible try to avoid the animation use images instead.
Once we have understood different page elements and there effects while loading, next step is figuring out what part of your current site takes up more time to load, so
Go to Submitplus “load time check” page
Enter your website or blog name to test for load time, and you would get a report of total page size, total graphics size and load time of your website or blog on different internet modem and broadband connections.
Further scrolling below, you also see a report of individual page elements name and how much size they take up, based on this report you can analyze and make your decision on speeding up your site load time.
Let me know if this was helpful.