When you visit your home business blog, does it seem to load slowly? Drag? Take a while to fully load all the images? If so it’s really a great idea to do some tweaks and help it to display faster.
Why is this a big deal? Because you want your visitors to hang around and read your content. View your offers. Subscribe to your list. Enjoy what you have to offer.
These days, people have LOTS of choices. If they land on your blog and it doesn’t load quickly, they might be tempted to just go somewhere else and look. I know from my own experience, if I visit a blog and it takes more than few seconds to load and navigate between pages, I usually just click away.
We are an impatient bunch these days. <smile>
Anyway, to get to the point, here are three free utilities you can use to test your blog and identify things that might be dragging it down and making it sluggish. Run these tests and you’ll get a surprising amount of insight.
Pingdom Tools – Test the Load Time of a Web Page
Use Pingdom to test the load speed of any of your pages. Check your home page first, then perhaps a sampling of others to get a feel for how quickly your blog responds. This tool will give you a nice report that you can use to identify things that are slowing your blog down. A good loading time for a blog page is 2-4 seconds.
P3 Plugin Performance Profiler
One of the biggest problems with WordPress blogs is having either too many plugins, or plugins that drag down your performance. This is often something that happens and you don’t even realize it. This tool analyzes your plugins and creates a report that shows their impact on your blog’s load time.
Once you identify the plugins that are dragging you down, you can choose to eliminate the ones that aren’t really necessary. I would bet that most home business blogs have lots of active plugins that really aren’t needed and simply hurt performance.
If you use Google Analytics on your home business blog, this plugin will give you more features including a variety of performance reports as well as a site speed test developed by Google. Very useful and helps make Google’s analytics easier to understand.
The bottom line is, make your home business blog run faster and provide your visitors with a better experience. Most people, when they visit a blog that loads quickly, tend to stay around longer. It’s just human nature. I hope these tips help you.
Did you get some value from this post? If you did, I would really appreciate you sharing it with others! And, your comments are welcome below!
Got a minute? Take a look at what’s working in an online business for me...
About Eldon Beard
Pingdoms is one of my favorite. Since it help me monitor my website. I think I need to try the P3 Plugin Performance Profiler. Thanks for this information.