When I started my first blog, I hosted it on those hosting. I paid $20 for the first year (I do not remember the name). I had a terrible experience, and my blog took forever to load.
Why Blog Loading Speed Matters
One of the biggest mistakes people make is ignoring site speed. When you are new, you want to save as much money as possible and get a bad hosting service that will make your blog load forever.
Here are two reasons why blog loading speed matters.
- It creates a bad user experience
- Google will hate you for it
It creates a bad user experience.
Imagine looking for the information, and as a normal human being, you go on Google and try to find that information.
You find the site with the exact information you are looking for, click it, and wait for over a minute, and you do not see anything loading.
You click back to the Google results page, frustrated and without your desired answer.
This is the exact process most of your users will go through if your site takes forever to load.
This will create a bad user experience, and as a result, you will lose a lot of potential buyers.
Google will hate you for it.
If you are writing articles and hoping for them to rank higher in Google so that the big Google can send you free traffic, a slow blog will bring you a lot of problems.
When people click from search results to your blog and click back in a few seconds, Google will take that as a sign of bad content or bad experience, and eventually, it will stop showing your blog in the search results.
Even if you have the best content in the world, slow site speed will make you lose potential visitors from Google and other search engines.
How to fix a slow site issues
Here are methods I recommend to increase the blog loading speed. I suggest four methods.
If you can combine the three of them, your blog loading speed should improve drastically.
Get fast hosting.
The first place to start is getting fast and reliable hosting. For this, I recommend Cloudways, as they will host your blog’s content in the cloud, making it accessible easily from different parts of the world; hence, it will load very quickly.
This is the perfect hosting for you. If you need fast and reliable but cheap web hosting, I recommend Cloudways. They start at $11 per month, and you pay only for the resources you use.
Use small images
Adding images to your blog posts makes them readable and enhances user experience.
The issue I found is that images are loaded first when browsing the posts, so if you have large images, your pages will be slower.
In this scenario, I recommend you shrink images before adding them to your blog posts. What I found working for me is ensuring that every image I upload to my blog is less than 500kb.
You can achieve this without compromising the quality of your images.
I use tinypng.com to reduce the size of images.
Use a cache plugin.
A cache plugin will save a portion of your content into the visitor’s browser so that when they return to your site, the site does not load all of the content ( some of it is already preloaded).
I use a WordPress plugin called W3 Total Cache. This is the highest-rated and most complete WordPress performance plugin.
Dramatically improve the speed and user experience of your site. Add browser, page, object, and database caching, as well as minify and content delivery network (CDN) to WordPress.
Use a CDN
If you follow the first three recommendations ( it should be enough for small sites) and your site speed is slow, you can use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
What is a Content Delivery Network?
A CDN is a network of servers that distributes your content around the globe.
Each visitor is sent your site’s information from the country on the CDN closest to their location.
This means that regardless of whether a visitor is in Southeast Asia, Europe, Cuba, etc., your site will consistently deliver a faster site speed.
A good option for this is called MaxCDN (no affiliation)
This small change will dramatically improve your blog’s speed for visitors worldwide.
Final words
In this post, we have seen why blog loading speed matters. This issue will create a bad user experience, and Google will punish you.
You can fix this by getting better and faster hosting, shrinking images before adding them to your blog posts, using a cache plugin, and using a Content Delivery Network.