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Every time someone visits a page on your website, their browser has to load every part of the page. On many pages, the parts that take up the most space and therefore take the longest time to load are the images. One of the best and easiest ways to get your pages loading faster is therefore to optimize your images.
This quick two-step image optimization process can go a long way to speeding your website up. They must pull up the initial image and then re-size it on the fly — which slows down your site. To prevent this from occurring, use an image-editing program to adjust images to the correct size yourself before adding them to your site. With these programs all you have to do is open up the image and re-size it in your editor of choice.
One of the best image compression tools available is ImageResize. All you have to do is click the link, upload your re-sized image and this tool will reduce the file size without reducing the resolution. Then, all you have to do is download the image and upload it to your site. Your images will look exactly the same, but will load much faster.
The huge number of plugins and scripts that available for free makes it tempting for website owners to add more than they truly need. Keep in mind, every plugin you add requires resources to run — and more resources means a slower site. If you notice your site is running slowly, or you believe it could be running much more effectively, perform a plugin review. Go ahead and get rid of these. Disable every plugin on your site, one by one.
After you disable a plugin, run your site through a tool like GT Metrix to check the speed of your site with it gone. If the plug-in in question provides a necessary functionality, experiment until you find another plugin that does the same thing without slowing your site down. To save yourself from this trouble in the future, ask yourself moving forward before adding a new plug-in if the functionality is really worth the trade-off in site speed.
If they are, upgrade your site as soon as possible making sure that you have a current backup file in place first. Site script developers are always working on improving their code for future releases, particularly when it comes to site speed. Updating your scripts to the latest versions could go a long way toward eliminating coded roadblocks that prevent your site from loading quickly. Just one click and your site will install the latest software updates.
No need for anything else on your end. Admittedly, remembering to check-in and update your website can be tough. Once a month is enough to do a simple run-through of your site and install any updates that might be available.
Set a recurring event on your calendar and set aside an hour every single month. Plus, having all of your software up to date will help to patch up any holes that could lead to your site being hacked.
This can lead to slow site speeds, especially if your visitors are located far away from the central location of your server. Better yet, if one of your server locations is overloaded, they can be switched to a new server location, ensuring faster speeds all around. This saves the number of resources used to display your pages, resulting in faster overall load times for your visitor. Alternatively, talk to your web developer about ways to integrate browser caching into your server-side scripting. There are three ways to turn on Gzip compression on your site.
Adding your CSS files to the top of the page prohibits progressive rendering, saving resources that web browsers would otherwise use to load and redraw elements of your pages. Adding Javascript to the bottom prevents your pages from waiting on full code execution before loading — leading to a faster browsing experience for your visitors. When someone new visits your website, every single element on the web page has to download for them to view it.
That includes images, videos, animations, style sheets, scripts, fonts — you name it. For each element you have on the page, a different http request is made. The more different parts each page on your site is made up of, the more http requests are made each time someone visits your site, and the longer the page will take to load. There are tricks you can use to identify and reduce the number and size of http requests on your page without losing out on the style you want your site to have.
As much as the internet feels untethered by the physical world, in fact, every word and image you see takes up a tiny amount of space in a room filled with servers somewhere. Web hosting companies own and maintain those servers. Now you understand the web hosting basics. Shared hosting will be the best choice for most new bloggers.
But as your blog gets more popular, you may end up upgrading over time to either a cloud hosting plan or a VPS hosting solution. While every blog will be different, the best web hosting for a blog will typically accomplish at least ten things. That usually means either that: Otherwise, they may leave your website and never come back. Website speed is an extremely important part of user experience. While there are a few different steps that bloggers can take to keep your blog loading as fast as possible for your users, one of the biggest factors in website speed is your web hosting.
You need both the right web hosting company and the right plan to make sure your website consistently performs at the kind of speeds your visitors expect. Hackers are always looking for opportunities to steal data or otherwise use a website for their own purposes.
Look for a web hosting provider that has a good reputation for security, offers SSL certification as part of their web hosting plans, and works with reputable security software like Sitelock. A good web hosting plan for a blog will make most of that pretty intuitive and provide a number of resources to help you learn the ropes when you get started. As in any industry, your experience with a web hosting company can change completely based on the quality of their customer service. If other customers have had issues getting the answers they need, then you may well experience the same.
The more work you put into your blog, the worse it would feel to lose it all in one fell swoop. Many web hosting providers offer automated backups as an affordable add-on to your web hosting service, so you can focus on your blogging, confident that all your work is saved and easily accessible if something happens. If you want readers to find your blog, then doing what you can to show up in search engines for relevant keywords should be an important part of your blogging strategy. Taking a few basic SEO steps can make a difference in how discoverable your website is, and the right web hosting platform can offer tools or features that make those steps a little easier.
Namely, you want an easy way to customize your URLs, fill in meta descriptions, and submit your website to search engines. Even better is a web hosting plan that offers SEO analytics and reporting features to help you track your SEO progress over time. Many bloggers hope to reach a point with their blogging efforts when they have enough devoted followers to start making money from their blog. The easiest way to get your blog ready to go without having to hire a professional or spend a lot of time learning how to code is with an easy-to-use website builder.
While there are many website builders you can subscribe to separately from your web hosting, you can cover two needs at once by going with a web hosting provider that also sells a website builder. A good website builder for blogging will include a number of responsive blog templates for you to choose from, easy drag-and-drop functionality, and handy multimedia and SEO features.
It will help you get your blog looking just how you want it without a big time commitment, so you can get straight into sharing your thoughts with the world. While some blogs will reach a point where they start to make money, for most bloggers, making a profit is unlikely. That means you probably want to spend as little as possible to get your blog going and keep it maintained.
Web hosting services bill on a subscription basis, so you can expect to pay either monthly or yearly for the length of time you have your blog. Consider both the upfront costs of a web hosting plan and the ongoing costs. If you start with basic shared hosting, also take a minute to research the cost of upgrading with your web hosting provider down the line.
Sticking with the same provider will make your life easier, so you want to know that if your blog takes off you can afford to switch to their cloud or VPS plans. Shared hosting is the most affordable web hosting plan and usually the one that makes the most sense for someone just starting out.
Since none of the sites sharing the server have just a huge amount of traffic, the server should be able to easily host all of them. WordPress is the most popular blogging platform out there. In order to have a successful website down the road, you need to find web hosting for WordPress sites that works with you and can adapt to your goals.
Cloud hosting moves your web hosting into the cloud, which makes your website instantly more scalable and faster.