Did you know that the website’s load time directly affects the amount of traffic and conversion rates? On average, a user closes a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. This is true for both PC users and those who navigate a website via mobile devices.
It forces the owners of web resources to invest a lot of effort in optimizing their portals. The steps include, but are not limited to SEO optimization, content optimization, and implementation of image CDN. Let’s look at some of them in more detail.
Speed
The loading speed of your blog pages is the first thing your customer will encounter after entering your blog. Therefore, this parameter needs to be refined first.
The fewer HTTP requests — the better
Each element on your site needs an HTTP request in order to be displayed in the visitor’s browser. It takes most of the time to process these requests. Minimizing them is your primary task.
You first need to determine how many requests you have. This can be done by analyzing the page code via browser dev tools. Most often, the Inspect command is responsible for this. It is triggered after right-clicking the mouse anywhere on the page. In the case of Chrome, you will see all the requests your blog is processing in the bottom left corner. The same panel will show which request is responsible for which element on the page. In order to minimize the number of requests, you must carefully filter out all those elements that are not needed on your blog.
Compress your files
The size of the files also has a great impact on your blog’s swiftness. Most often, images take up a lot of space. They can occupy up to 68% of the total weight of a page. This is especially true for beauty or fashion blogs. Compression is used in order to lower the size of images.
There are two compression methods — lossy and lossless. The former method allows for a significant reduction in image weight. However, this will also lead to a loss in picture quality. Use this method only for those images, where quality is not critical. In this case, a change won’t be apparent to the naked eye. Such compression can be done using Photoshop.
The other compression method — lossless — allows you to maintain the quality of an image, but its weight does not decrease significantly. In order to achieve the best result, you need to apply the appropriate method to each particular image. Compress the image as much as possible, but remember to sustain the weight-quality balance. You can carry out lossless compression using TinyJPG.
Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDN is a chain of distributed proxy servers (nodes) that disperse your blog’s content around the globe. This is done in order to physically put the content closer to the visitor. Yes, physical distance matters too. This is not necessary for those blogs that target only the local audience. However, web blogs exist precisely to produce global content.
In addition to cutting down the distance between the visitor and your main server, CDN is also responsible for optimizing the files on your blog for a specific user. In other terms, CDN understands, which device the reader uses to navigate through your site — up to the dimension of the screen. Then it adjusts the format, size, and resolution of content elements specifically to the customer’s device.
CDN reduces the possibility of various errors and gaps between the visitor and the node and generally improves the productivity of your blog.
User Interface
Optimizing your blog’s UI will instantly affect the session length and conversion rates.
Readability
There are a lot of methods of readability improvement. The most crucial of them are increasing the font size, experimenting with colors (text, elements, background), increasing margins, and so on. It is important to maintain balance and test all these points in order to choose the best combination.
Functional elements
Properly placed functional elements of your UI can literally encourage the user to take the action you want. A functional design element can be anything from embedded YouTube videos to a highlighted bullet-point list.
There shouldn’t be too many functional elements and they must be placed with the utmost care. Avoid being too spammy as it can turn your blog into an unreadable ad-jammed portal from the early 2000s.
Work with space
When we say “work” we mean “use”. The strategic use of white space not only improves readability but also highlights important objects or information in the user’s eyes. If this does not sound convincing to you, then check this material also.
Be consistent
All elements of your blog’s design, as well as their characteristics, must match and be part of the same mechanism. The size and style of the font and titles, the width of the indents, the spacing between paragraphs and images, font, buttons, color palette — the list goes on and on. Your blog design should be memorable and recognizable but still, follow the same pattern on literally every page of your blog.
Final Words
Unfortunately, one article is enough to describe only the main methods that are used for the optimization of blogs. Any web resource is a complicated mechanism, and there are many things that need constant optimization. In addition, all elements of a working web blog are subject to constant monitoring from a technical point of view. We hope that we managed to outline the main points that a novice blogger should take into account.