11 easy ways to optimize and speed up your wordpress blog

Child Theme in Wordpress

WordPress is a very popular Content Management System (CMS) that is widely used by many blogs and even websites. It has many features that make the process of editing, managing and publishing of the web content easier. One of the downsides of such a feature rich CMS is that it tends be slow in serving web content. There are several…

seo: 8 tips to optimize css files to speed up page loading and rendering

Dynamic Lining of CSS Files in Google PSS

Cascading Style Sheets or CSS files are an integral part of all modern websites. It allows you keep your content and layout separate and maintainable over the long run. This also mean that these files can grow in size over time and can negatively impact the page load time. When you optimize CSS files for size, you reduce the time…

seo: how to avoid bad requests to improve page load speed of your webpage

Web Console and Network details - Firefox

As webpages and websites change and evolve over time, it is inevitable that resources will be moved, deleted and/or renamed. Most times when a resource changes, the corresponding usage in pages are to be updated to reflect the change. But often there are so many references in complex web pages that it is very easy to miss some of the…

sitemap generators: how to generate sitemaps for a website or blog

Snippet from an XML Sitemap

Sitemap is a list of URLs to webpages in your website that are to be made accessible to search engines and web crawlers. There are several different reasons to have a sitemap for the website, much of which is related to Webpage SEO. This URL list is usually stored in an XML file, using an XML structured format. This format also…

seo: how to minimize the request size in an HTTP request

SEO: Request Size

Every page load on the web browser involves several connections to the server usually numbering in the hundreds, each of which ideally involves a request to the server and a response from the server. In order to speed up the page load times, you will need to reduce both the number of requests as well as the size of the…

seo: how to minify source files to reduce the webpage size and improve rendering

Html CSS include code

Minification is the process by which all unnecessary characters, including white spaces are removed from the source files so as to reduce the size of the file, without comprising any of the functionality of the program. The unnecessary characters can include spaces, blank, new line and comments. Almost all web programming or rendering languages such as HTML, JavaScript and Style-sheets…

seo: why you should put the external style sheets (css) in the document head

Inlining css in html helps with SEO

Every webpage has a head tag at the top of the source, known as the document head. It is different from what is sometimes referred as a header. Header usually refers to the visual elements that constitute the top part of a web site. Usually the header has a constant look and feel across all the pages, often containing the…

seo: how to reduce the HTTP requests and number of resources per page

Wordpress SEO description tag

Almost every webpage consists of mainly some text content and several web resources, such as images, external JavaScript files, external style sheets and other related files. In order for the web page to render correctly in the browser, it needs to download and often parse each of these web resources. Ideally you would want is to reduce the number of…

seo: specify image dimensions to improve the page rendering speed

Dimensions in img tag

Images are one of the most resource intensive elements on a webpage. It can negatively affect the rendering of a web page as well as one of the major factors affecting the page load speed on your webpages. There are several steps you can take to improve the performance of the images while rendering. First and foremost, you should optimize…

seo: how to remove query strings from static resources

SEO Recommendations

When you analyze your page using any page analyzer such as Page Speed, YSlow or Pingdom, you are very likely to see suggestions to remove query strings from static resources. This is an easy enough task that can get your pages and resource to cache better so that the pages can load faster. A query string refers to the last…

seo: the importance of serving scaled images in webpages

Gimp Menu to scale an image

Almost all web pages or at least a vast majority of them have images in them. Images are an integral part of the web pages these days unlike when the bandwidth and download speed used to be a premium. That also means that images and media files are also one of the biggest resource hogs in terms of the size. Images can…