Trying To Make Money Blogging

Hopefully I’m not the only person who does this, but if I’m visiting a blog which takes a stupid amount of time to load, I’ll move on and probably never visit again. This is the worst thing that could happen to a blog, especially if it’s a blog used for making money. Sadly In this day and age people want things there and then, they have no time for slow loading pages. There are lots of reasons why a blog could be loading slowly. Some you can prevent and some you can’t.

Your host sucks
Your hosting company may be the main cause of your sloth like blog. If you’re on paid hosting and your blog is slow, the best thing to do is email them and ask them what the hell is going on. Be polite but straight to the point. If they tell you it’s a temporary glitch give them a week to sort it out. If that week is up and there’s no real change, tell them your going to move hosts. This has worked for me in the past. Hosting companies hate bad reviews and they don’t want to loose your $7 a month.

Free hosting may be attractive, but at the end of the day it’s free. Your free hosting company has no real obligation to provide you with 100% up time and turbo charged loading times. If you moan at a free host most of the time you’ll get told to shut up and to lump it or leave it. If you’re serious about your blog you really need to get your ass over to a paid host. Paid hosting isn’t that expensive, I pay $9.95 a month for another one of my sites which is on the middle of rage hosting package.

Java Script
A lot of widgets, ad banners, news readers etc use JavaScript. Having to many of these will slow down your blog. Some of them eat up a lot of resources, some are poorly coded and some just refuse to load. Think to yourself, do I really need to be displaying my local weather on my blog? I doubt anyone really pays any attention to it.

Flash
Blogs full of flash sometimes cause a persons CPU memory usage to shoot through the roof. You have to remember that not everyone on the internet has a twin turbo charged p.c with a 100mb broadband connection. Obviously, if you’re a flash games blog, you’re going to need to display lots of flash but there’s lots of things you can do to prevent flash lag. Google is your friend. Here’s one example. If you’re displaying games on your front page why not take a screen shot of the game and place it on the front page instead of the actual game? Then just make sure the screen shot is linked to the page where the actual flash game is displayed.

Audio/Video
A lot of people hate videos, nearly all hate audio on blogs. Do you really need to be playing music on your blog? Apart from slow loading times, videos and audio have scared the crap out of me many a time. If Audio and Video are essential for your blog, the least you can do is give the visitor the option to play it or not. Doing so will help loading times and it will save a lot of people from having to change their underwear. Never have them set to auto start.

Images
Images are only a problem if you haven’t reduced the file size and the image size. If you have a huge image, resize the thing, or display it as a thumbnail nail first and then display it on its own page. File size is also important, the larger the size of the file the slower it will load. I use photoshop for all of my image editing, when it’s time to save an image, I always make sure the preview is of medium quality. I never display the full high quality image on my front page.

These are just a few ideas, there are many many more. Just remember, if your blog looks and loads well for you it doesn’t neccessarily mean it’s going to be the same for your visitors. Always remember to test your blog on I.E and Firefox as well. But that’s only if the option is available to you.

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