Thursday, April 17. 2008

Blogger Tutorial: Speed Up Your Blogspot Blog

If you're a blogger who uses Google's blogspot to host your blog here's a quick suggestion that might help you get some traffic that stays long enough to make a comment, maybe even become a regular subscriber. Reduce the number of posts on your front page.

Believe me when I tell it is not cool, or trendy, or helping your SEO, or making your site more user friendly to have a 30 or 40 posts on your homepage, all of them filled with images or YouTube videos, and your siderbars filled with so many widgets you can't actually see the content for them.

Take a hint, reduce the number of posts on your page, and seriously think about how many widgets you really need. I understand that some of them might make you some money, by all means keep these, but do you really need to display every award your friends have given you or those stupid widgets like the purring pussy cat that follows your mouse cursor I've seen.
No, you don't! Please listen to this advice, a lot of you have the Entrecard widget on your blog, so I know traffic is important to you, so make it easier for your site visitors to appreciate your blog. You may think your site loads pretty quickly, but remember, most of the stuff on your blog is cached by your browser so of course your page loads quickly for you, but it sure doesn't for your visitors.

I've become involved in Entrecard dropping, and not just as a power dropper but also leaving a lot of comments scattered around the place. But when I come across a blog that takes too long to load, heck I hit the close tab button so fast... I would stop and make a comment, but not if your site takes a couple of minutes or more to download.

You see, many of you use fancy themes that mean a visitor can't actually read your posts until the page is fully downloaded, usually because the text is the same color as the page border, yeah I know, you're thinking but I have white background behind the text, yeah, you may very well, but that white background doesn't show until the whole page is downloaded and you know that that means, I can't read your post until the white background is there because your text is the same color as the page border.

So, to help you out, here's a really quick tutorial on how to reduce the number of posts on your page.
Changing number of posts to display on blogger
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Posted by Carl in Blogger at 00:29   Comments (9)

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  1. Nicole said,

    Friday, April 18. 2008 at 09:15 (Reply)

    Great post! Please consider hosting this at the top of your blog for however long it takes to convert everyone who is an Entrecarder and uses blogger!

    Some of those blogs load so slowly, it causes me to click off before dropping a card. VERY frustrating.

  2. Asuka_Aki said,

    Saturday, April 19. 2008 at 05:45 (Reply)

    This is great. I never thought to try this out. My first page actually loks cluttered. I was wondering if I should show only a full article or 5 to 10 excerpts.

  3. Jillian said,

    Friday, April 18. 2008 at 11:46 (Reply)

    Heh. You already know I agree with this!!

    Hear! Hear!

  4. Carl said,

    Friday, April 18. 2008 at 11:51 (Reply)

    Thank you both for commenting, I was hoping a few more people would agree with me but I stoopidly forgot to enable comments on this post, but our depth of opinion has convinced me I need to make this my life mission, Thank you.

  5. Hariette Wendam said,

    Saturday, April 19. 2008 at 04:58 (Reply)

    Great post!!! thanks for the advice!!!

  6. Mudiva said,

    Saturday, April 19. 2008 at 05:49 (Reply)

    Great post and I so agree with you. I have gone to sites where the page takes forever to load and so I don't bother sticking around.
    I sure hope my page doesn't take forever to load. If it does please let me know. :-)

  7. Mar Matthias Darin said,

    Saturday, April 19. 2008 at 12:06 (Reply)

    This is a very good point. I personally perfer the number of posts per page to be small. I believe it help keep a visitors focus and keeps the page clutter done.

  8. zariel said,

    Wednesday, April 23. 2008 at 05:06 (Reply)

    I'm using your modified template currently....
    just want ta ask you...does your template have some codes that make me unable to put another codes especially to expand my post...

    p/s sorry about my english. hope you can understand

  9. Carl said,

    Wednesday, April 23. 2008 at 05:44 (Reply)

    Hi Zariel,

    No, my Blogger templates are quite standard in most ways, I can't think of anything that get in your way.

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