If I were to describe the internet users of today in one word, I should say that the word “impatient” sums them up pretty nicely.

A few days ago, I fancied trying out Internet Explorer in viewing my blog just to check how things would turn out compared to FireFox. As expected, their differences already showed just as the pages on their screens started loading. And it was at that time that I found out something very unsettling.

If I got the timing right, it takes about a minute or so for my main page to fully load using Internet Explorer and around 45 seconds using FireFox under a DSL connection. My observations may seem insignificant to some but such an amount of time is already alarming for both web developers and internet specialists.

Internet users are known to be very impatient people. They don’t want to wait and waste their time. They want their food as hot and as fast as possible. One minute is already a lot of time. It may be okay for a regular reader of my blog to wait and endure a whole minute, but for a new visitor? Highly unlikely.

Small Potato from WPDesigner once said in one of his reviews that “you have less than eight seconds to keep a user in front of a loading screen“. So if it takes more than that, chances are, your visitors might give up waiting for your blog to load! Gasp!

If you are curious about your blog’s loading speed, you can time it yourself or you could make use of page load testers such as the Website Analyzer from WebsiteOptimizer.com. Just fill out the website URL field and they will show the results.

So how can I make my blog load faster?
Making a site to load faster takes a lot of work, it usually takes a site overhaul to optimize a website. If you are really serious on optimizing your blog, you could try seeking the aid of website optimizers, or you could try applying the tips that I have gathered below:

• If possible, try to refrain from placing too many images on your blog. You could also try lowering the size and resolution of the images (without sacrificing visual quality) by using Photoshop or online image optimizer tools like DynamicDrive.com’s Online Image Optimizer.

• You may also want to upload the images on your own server. This way, it would be easier and faster for the blog to retrieve the images.

• The avatars on MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog also adds to the loading time. Try lowering the number of avatars to be shown or instead of showing those big avatar images, you may want to use the small sized ones.

• Placing multimedia objects such as videos and music players on the front page could also affect the speed of the page load. Try placing it after the “read more” tab.

• Lower the number of posts to be shown on the front page. The most ideal would be from 5 to 8 posts.

• Check and see if the code of the theme or layout of your blog is well formed. If not, you could try to fix it manually or you could always look for a better theme.

• Untested and poorly coded plugins can also add to the load time.

• New Addition! Joiz shares that the scripts that we use from MyBlogLog, Twitter, and the like also adds to the loading time of your blog. We call these things as external objects/scripts. So you may want to refrain from putting to many scripts that require external requests on your blog.

I already tried the tips above on my blog and from a lagging time of 45 seconds, my blog loading time decreased to 40 seconds. 5 second difference? Not bad for a blog with lots of images on the frontpage.

The results may not be much, but it could help lessen the loading time even a little. Let’s just hope people could develop a little patience when waiting for a blog to load… Hey, we could always tell our readers to switch to FireFox!

How long does your blog load? Has your blog’s loading time improved by doing the tips above? How long does it take you to wait for a loading page? Leave your thoughts on the comment form below!

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