How to make your Blogger/Blogspot Blog load Faster

A web browser, just like the one you’re using now, uses HTTP requests to load a webpage. Making an HTTP request takes a bit of time, so the more you have the slower things are going to get. You might then assume that it’d be better to put your CSS and Javascript all in the same file, but then caching comes into the picture.

When you visit any page your browser makes a copy of some of the files, you probably already know this. So caching is important when you have people visiting your site multiple times. Larger files take longer to load, so if we have them stored locally (cached) your website will load faster.

Making Your Blog Load Faster

1. Less Images -
Loading less images means less HTTP request. That means faster load times! So removing images that you don’t need is your next option. Sometimes you need a lot of images though, and that’s where CSS sprites come in! To put it simply, you put all of your images that don’t repeat into one file. You can then include them in CSS like so:

background: url('images/file.png') Xpx Ypx;
width: 500px;
height: 500px;

The Xpx and Ypx are the coordinates of the image you want in the sprite file, and the width and height are the width and the height of it. So this is more lines of code, which you’d think would take longer to load, right? However, the fact that you’re loading multiple images in one file and thus making less HTTP requests will actually greatly decrease your load times.

2. Combine files -
You may notice that sometimes people use multiple Javascript and CSS files. Sometimes this is a good idea, like if you’re including one javascript file on only one page, and then another on all the pages.

Sometimes though, you’ll find you have a lot of files and scripts that are used on almost all your pages, all in different files! That’s no good! So what you should do is combine these into one, which should hopefully radically decrease load times.

3. Optimize your files -
When you make your own blog, it’s easy to add useless CSS and Javascript everywhere while working on it. This can seriously slow down your website! Removing spaces, line breaks, and things comments can also really optimize load times. You should consider having a set of files for development, and a set of files for your website

4. Better Coding -
Everytime you make a mistake in HTML your browser has to figure out what you did wrong and corrects it to the best of its ability. Less errors in your code means less correcting, so the browser can spend more time actually loading the page instead!

Useful Stuffs -

1. You might want to try out Pingdom for testing just how fast your website loads
2. If you’re using Chrome or Safari (dev tools) you can right click and select ‘Inspect Element’. Then click Audit and run it. This will give you lots of tips on how you can speed it up even more!