The Ultimate Guide to Building a Fast Blog and Why it Matters

Speed matters!

High quality content, inbound links and easy navigation are not enough to make your blog or website successful. Internet users today expect a website to load as fast as possible. They really feel cheated by blogs that take a very long time to respond to their web requests.

When it comes to your user’s site  experience and position in search engines, how fast your website loads is a vital factor.

In this post, I’ve covered everything you should know about how to build a fast loading blog and website: why it matters, what are the tools to test it, and what practices you should follow to building a fast blog!

Why speed matters

User experience:

It’s a well known fact if a website takes too long to load; a visitor is more likely to move on to other website (most likely competitors). With the increased internet speed, usage and accessibility, today’s users expect the fastest and most reliable online experience. Everyone has “very limited time” to surf the internet and no one likes to wait on a web page to load.

So, what’s the time limit for a visitor to felicitously wait for loading a web page? Previously it was considered that maximum waiting time should be less than seven seconds. But today, in the world of improved technology, users expect a web page (with simple content) to completely load within two seconds or less. And if a web page takes more than two seconds to load, chances are up to 40% of users may leave your site.

AdWords quality score:

Maybe you’re not aware of this, but the speed of your website can actually impact your Quality Score. Google knows very well that customers are likely to convert on a faster website, so they’ve put more emphasis on the landing page loading speed. If the performance of your landing page is dull, then your Quality Score will suffer.

Apart from this, Quality Score drives your CPC campaigns. It means faster loading speed can help you reduce your advertising costs. In short, faster page load speed results into higher quality score, and higher quality score leads to enhanced spending efficiency and more reach.

Organic rankings:

In 2010, Google had announced that page load speed would be an important factor in determining the ranking of websites in search engine results. Google algorithm makes use of multiple factors to determine where to rank your website in search engine result pages. Some of these factors are evaluation of the legitimacy of the website itself (like number of quality inbound links and age of the domain name), while others are related to a webpage content itself (like title, description, text, URL etc.).

However, after the announcement of Google, it became crucial for website owners to improve their page load time. So if you care about getting ranked higher and more traffic from Google, you should improve your website website’s performance. Though fast load time isn’t a huge ranking factor, but it’s quite important.

Mobile users:

Generally, it is considered that mobile users have more patience than desktop users. The reason is that they use a slower internet connection. But in the present scenario, while the internet connection speed is very fast, page load time became an important factor for mobile users.

Therefore, website owners should keep in mind this factor while using tools to manage mobile versions of their websites. Also, designers and coders should create simple and lightweight mobile version of a website in order to avoid server overload and make sure that the website will load quickly on mobile devices.

Competitors cash in:

When a user clicks away from a web page on your site due to slow load speed, your competitors benefit from it. In traffic rush hours, 75% of online consumers move to a competitor’s site rather than having the patience to wait for a website to load. Hence, if your site is slow, you’re not only going to lose your visitors and money, but also indirectly handle your valuable customers over to your competitors.

Free tools to test your site’s speed

Google PageSpeed Insights:

Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool lets you test the performance of a web page both for desktop and mobile devices. It fetches the URL of a web page twice, once with a desktop user-agent, and once with a mobile user-agent. It measures how the page can boost its performance on: time to full page load and time to above-the-fold content load. After analyzing the content of a web page, it generates “consider fixing” and “should fix” type recommendations, which you can use to make your web page faster on all devices.

YSlow:

YSlow, developed by Yahoo, analyzes a web page and accordingly gives you suggestions to improve its performance. All the generated suggestions are based on a set of 23 web performance rules, which are defined by Yahoo’s Performance team. Additionally, it gives your web page a Grade that is based on one of three predefined rule set.

GTMetrix:

GTMetrix is another popular and effective website performance testing tool that helps you optimize your website’s speed and give your visitors an all-around improved experience. Using Google Page Speed and YSlow, it grades the performance of your site and makes actionable recommendations available to you. In addition, you can also set up monitored alerts and view your page load in a filmstrip view.

Pingdom:

Pingdom offers a wide range of website speed testing tools that enables you to monitor the performance of your website and provides invaluable insights to help you make it faster. Using Pingdom, you will be able to monitor individual files and requests on your site and can know the reasons which cause poor website performance. From page analysis to a performance grade, they provide quite useful information related to your website.

MaxCDN Tools:

MaxCDN recently released their set of testing tools through which you can test your website’s performance at 12 different locations around the globe. Performing Ping test, you can compare the ping speed of two domains and know how your site performs against your competitors. Finally, the HTTP Speed Test enables you compare the speed of first and last byte of two websites.

Quick tips to speed up your site

Upgrade your server:

The connectivity and speed of a website depends on the type of server being used for hosting. If your site is hosted on a shared hosting server, upgrade it to a VPS or dedicated server that allows your website having more server resources available. Hosting your website on a shared server may result in web pages being load slower.

Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network):

One of the best ways to decrease your website’s page speed is to host your media files on a content delivery network. Using a CDN, you can save up to 60% bandwidth and halve the number of requests made by your website. Some of the popular and reputed CDNs are MaxCDN, CloudFlare, and Amazon CloudFront.

Minimize HTTP requests:

According to Yahoo, up to 90% of the end-user response time is tied up in downloading the different components – like images, scripts, flash, style sheets etc. – of a web page. When someone land on your website, an HTTP request is made for each one of these components. The best practice for minimizing the number of HTTP requests is to eliminate all unnecessary things from your site.

Enable Gzip compression:

Nowadays, Gzip is the most used compression method that doesn’t only save bandwidth, but also speed up web page load time. A web page containing high quality content is often bigger than 100kb and this result in slower page load time. By compressing your website’s content, you can reduce the response size by about 70%. To check whether your site is Gzip enabled or not, you can useGziptest.

Optimize images:

There are two important things that you should keep in mind while uploading images to your website: size and format. As large images take much longer than expected time to load, so it’s crucial to crop your images to the correct size before uploading. For the format of your images, .jpg and .png are best options. Use GIFs for small graphics, and also avoid using .bmp and .tiff formats.

Minify your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files:

WYSIWYG resources make building web pages easy for people, but they sometimes generate junk code that can slow down your website. To avoid slow loading time, you need to minify your files. To minify HTML, you can use chrome extension PageSpeed Insights to get the optimized version of your HTML code. To minify CSS, try cssmin.js and YUI Compressor. And to minify JavaScript, use JSMin and Closure Compiler.

Put scripts at the bottom:

If you want to get your content delivered to your visitors as fast as possible, it’s highly recommended to put scripts as close to the bottom of your page as possible. The reason behind this is simple: visitors would not like to see a blank page while the browser is busy in loading different script related files. Also, put your CSS at the top of your page since browsers would render the CSS file before rendering your page.

Minimize redirects:

Though sometimes it is necessary to redirect a visitor from one URL to another, but if you have a lot of redirects on your site, your site will suffer delay in page load. Redirections lead to additional HTTP requests, which increase web page load time. So minimize the number of redirects even though you have a responsive version of your web site.

Enable browser caching:

When a visitor lands on your site for the first time, different components (like HTML document, style sheets, JavaScript files and images) of your website are stored on his hard drive in a temporary storage, or cache. The next time when the user visits your site, the browser loads the web page from its local cache instead of sending another HTTP request to the server. So, it’s quite important to enable browser caching in order to enhance the performance of your website.

Monitor & improve:

One of the best ways to make your website super speedy is to monitor its performance on a regular basis and make necessary improvements accordingly. Furthermore, always run some quick tests especially when you make any changes in your website’s code or content to see the results.

Author Bio: Ajeet  Yadav is an experienced web developer at CreativeWebLogix – Get Your Existing Site To Responsive. His area of interest are WordPress, HTML5, CSS3, and Responsive. Don’t forget to follow @CWL_WEBDESIGN to get latest updates via Twitter.

The Ultimate Guide to Building a Fast Blog and Why it Matters - Jeffbullas's Blog

9 Tips on How to Build Raving Fans for Your Blog

Having a loyal readership is key to achieving success as a blogger or
online publisher. You may have the best blog in your niche or even the
most useful posts, but what good are your efforts if you don’t have a
steady stream of readers to appreciate your work?


Even if your blog attracts 50,000 visitors per month, it doesn’t do
you much good if your bounce rate is 100%. No matter what your blog may
be about, you need faithful readers who keep coming back for more.


With the right promotion and SEO, you might be able to get some
eyeballs, but building a loyal readership isn’t something that happens
overnight. It is something you consciously have to create, and that is
where true marketing comes into the picture.


These nine tips, when executed properly, will show you how to build raving fans for your blog, but grow your revenues.

1. Know your target audience

Before you even start to market and promote your blog, make sure you
are clear about your target audience. Who do you want to reach out to?
The whole Internet? Sure. Good luck with that. Writing about every topic
known to man makes you an expert in nothing.


Focus your blog posts on a specific subject and you can narrow down
your target audience. For example, if most of your current readers are
freelance writers, then produce content that will cater to their
interests and needs, such as”

• How to become a freelance writer
• How to write better
• How to market your services as a freelancer

The important thing is that you know to whom you are reaching out.
Once you’re clear about that, you can mold your content to address their
problems and develop a marketing strategy with a clear message. This
information will also allow you to determine what types of products or
services your readers may be interested in purchasing.

2. Don’t make selling your focus

The Internet – no, the world – has too many people who just want to
sell you something and make a quick buck. Consumers/readers are aware of
that, and if your site is all about selling your readers something,
then they won’t trust you. And no one does business with someone they
don’t trust.


Like Warren Buffett said:


“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”


Now, that is not to say you can’t make money or sell anything. The
idea is that you do not focus on selling at all. Instead, try to educate
your readers and let them make decisions for themselves. In fact, don’t
be afraid to down-sell when you believe a cheaper product/service might
be a better fit for a client. Positive online reviews and social shares
catch on quickly.


This post builds goodwill with potential “customers” because the
focus is to educate them on their options when building a blog, not
force them into a sales funnel that convinces them “WordPress is the
only blogging platform available and you have to use it if you want to
make any money online.”

3. Blog to provide value

I am sure you have read this so many times, but what does it really mean? Value, just like beauty, is relative.


What you may consider “valuable” may be considered “useless” to your
target audience. That is why it is important to know your target
audience. Understanding your readers – both existing and potential –
will be your beacon when deciding what is valuable information.


For instance, if your audience consists of bloggers looking to grow
their online business, then you can offer a plethora of tips, guides,
advice, and tricks:

• How to build a landing page
• How to optimize conversions
• Understanding consumer psychology
• Essential plugins to increase page load speed
• Best themes to encourage social sharing
• How to write attention-grabbing titles
• Places to get free images
• New SEO news or Google algorithm updates
• How to develop a personal brand
• How to hire freelance writers/editors/designers

Be as specific as you can, so that you are addressing your target
audience’s needs, concerns, and questions. Eventually when you do offer a
product or service, your reader’s confidence in your ability to provide
“value” will encourage them to buy something you endorse.

4. Put extra effort into crafting your headlines

We’ve all seen how Upworthy and Viral Nova started a trend using the curiosity gap in
their titles. This trend highlights the importance of the title because
no one clicks through to read an article when the headline doesn’t
interest them.


Don’t just use the first title that comes to mind. Think about it.
Write it down. Think about it again and again till you find the right
combination of words. Some of your better content may be getting
overlooked because of an overly SEO’d title.

5. Link to external expert sources

Linking is a sensitive topic, especially with Google handing out
penalties left and right. However, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t
link out to other authoritative sites or bloggers. In my experience, it
all boils down to providing your audience with valuable information,
such as research, case studies, white papers, posts from experts or
well-known bloggers, etc. Remember the “curiosity gap” link above? This
is also one of the better ways of developing relationships with other
bloggers.

6. Interact – respond to comments

Content providers do have the main goal of writing and publishing,
but your work doesn’t stop there. If you want to develop a direct
connection with readers, then you have to interact with them and fellow
bloggers as well.


A comments section starts a dialogue. By monitoring and approving
comments, you obviously accomplish the task of catching spam that gets
through anti-spam plugins. But you should also remember that your
regular readers look up to you, and if you’re an expert in the field,
maybe even see you as a mini-celebrity. Responding to comments forms a
powerful connection with readers because it indirectly shows you care.

7. Engage on key social media networks

When it comes to marketing, social media is a prime tool.
While it doesn’t directly factor into Google’s algorithm yet, it can
still drive an abundance of free traffic. Don’t turn your back on it,
but don’t overdo it, either.

Tighten Your Focus on Social Media

There are so many social media platforms these days, and some
bloggers believe it to be necessary to establish a presence on all of
them. While creating a profile on every platform is easy enough, not all
social media will provide a sufficient return on investment.


What you can do instead is look at the platforms where you have the
best results – a growing following, significant interaction/sharing, and
click-through traffic. For my site in the personal finance space, I get
the most traffic from Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. LinkedIn and
Google Plus haven’t had the same impact for me, but everyone has
different experiences.

Analyze Your Social Media Stats

Once you have identified your ideal platform(s), then you get down to
the nitty gritty. You can’t just publish a Facebook post or tweet
whenever you want and hope your readers see it, like it, re-share it,
and so on. There are some things to consider when maximizing the reach
and interaction of each of your posts:

• When is your audience online? Facebook gives you Page Insights so
  you can find out what times your followers are online the most. With
  this knowledge, you can time your posts accordingly.
• What kinds of posts/tweets get most views, likes, comment, and re-shares?
• What type of media do your visitors like and interact with?
• How do you market content on Google Plus?

Additionally, you can use tools to make it easier to manage posting
and tweeting as well as analyze their impact. I highly recommend Buffer,
which allows you to connect various social media platforms, set
schedules, schedule posts, and see stats such as clicks, likes, and
shares.

Don’t Be A Mere Broadcaster

Pushing your content on social media in order to get clicks is well
and good – we want that! But if you only focus on broadcasting your own
content, then you’ll probably turn people off.


We circle back to one thing…interaction!


This includes:

• Respond to comments
• Like them. Reply to tweets
• Follow other people in the same niche
• Interact with authoritative figures in your industry
• Show your followers the real person behind the site.

8. Create something of extra value, and give it away

More than the usual blog post or article, why not occasionally create
something extra, like a guide or how-to manual? A short eBook in PDF
form will suffice. The idea is to bring something new to the table, and give it away for free. This can even be used as a hook to get email subscribers and grow your mailing list.

Set up a newsletter

You have a couple of options here. You can provide a roundup of what
you have recently published, something like a “Best Of” for 2014. Or
maybe an exclusive article only seen in the newsletter.


A few things to consider when creating a newsletter:

• You need to test the best way to convert visitors and encourage them
  to opt-in. Some sites use a sidebar banner, a plug after every post, or
  a popup for visitors who have been on the site for at least 30 seconds.
  You will need to test to find what works best for your traffic and site
  design.
• Make sure you don’t spam. Be picky about what you include in the
  newsletter. Make sure you yourself would want to open that newsletter
  every time it lands in your Inbox; otherwise, you risk losing
  subscribers and a shrinking mailing list.

9. Have passion

None of this would be possible without passion. You must be
passionate about your blog’s subject and genuinely want to help your
readers improve their lives or businesses. I once read somewhere that
writing is like sex – you can’t fake it, so don’t even try. Like a
significant other, your readers can always tell.


With some consistent hard work and execution, you can develop a loyal
readership too. Just always try to give more than you ask, and your
readers will love you for it.


How do you build relationships with your readers?


Author bio: Gary Dek is the blogger behind StartABlog123.com as well as a dozen other niche sites. His passion is helping new and professional bloggers build sustainable online businesses.

Comparison of Blogger Vs WordPress Vs Tumblr Vs Posterous

Earlier, we have discussed How To Create Blogs on Blogger, WordPress.Com, Tumblr & Posterous and even discussed the Pros & Cons of Blogger, WordPress.Com, Tumblr & Posterous platforms and today we are bringing out a quick comparison of Blogger Vs WordPress.Com Vs Tumblr Vs Posterous and check out the merits and demerits of the platforms when compared to others.

Quick comparison of Blogger Vs WordPress.Com Vs Tumblr Vs Posterous Blogging Platforms

Parameters	Blogger	WordPress.Com	Tumblr	Posterous
Who Owns it?	Google, Inc	Automattic, Inc (Creators of WordPress Software)	Tumblr, Inc	Posterous, Inc
Pricing	Free	Free	Free	Free
Post By eMail	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Post Scheduling	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Custom Domain Mapping	Possible, You can map your own domain for free	Possible, You need to purchase the domain from WordPress.Com (domain registration costs $17)	Possible, You can map your own domain for free	Possible, You can map your own domain for free
CSS Editing	Possible, Free	No for Free accounts, Possible by paying $15/year	Possible, Free	Possible, Free
Own Themes/Templates	You can use your own themes	No support for Own Themes	You can use your own themes	You can use your own themes
SEO Advantage	YES, Of course it is Google’s Platform	YES, Known well for its SEO benefits	YES, Limited	YES, Limited
Free Storage	1 GB + 1GB from Picasa for storing pictures	3 GB	1 GB	1 GB
Bandwidth	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Analytics	Google Analytics, Can Use 3rd Party Tools	WordPress Stats, No Support for 3rd Party Tools	Google Analytics, Can Use 3rd Party Tools	Google Analytics, Can Use 3rd Party Tools
Advertising	Integrates well with Google Adsense & you can monetize with your favorite advertiser as well.	No	Limited	Not Supported
Javascripts	Yes	No	YES, Limited	YES, Limited
Mobile Apps	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

If you ask my personal suggestion for a free blogging platform among Blogger Vs WordPress Vs Tumblr Vs Posterous I will recommend you to  go for Blogger and if you want to be a real Blogging Ninja, self hosted WordPress blogging platform will be the solution for any one and even InfoGenra is powered by Self hosted WordPress Software.

Tagged as: Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr

via infogenra.com