The other day I was searching for a specific recipe that I had bookmarked some time back. I was on my mobile phone and I had to quickly access the recipe blog.
I clicked on the link and waited for the page to open. The wait went on for a few seconds and the page was still loading. Out of desperation, I closed the site and quickly switched to my laptop.
I went to my bookmarks and clicked on the link again. The site started loading. After some preliminary stuff had loaded the site was still loading. I waited because I was not able to do anything. My browser was stuck, the page wouldn’t scroll, nothing would click and nothing would move.
Guess what would have been my reaction – Frustration.
And out of frustration I closed the site and searched for other places where I could get hold of that recipe. I even deleted the bookmark because keeping that there was of no use.
Now, this is a situation where I knew about the blog and I was willing to give it a few minutes. Imagine if you are browsing to find something and you stumble upon such a site.
You are seeing the site for the first time.
What will be your reaction?
This is not an uncommon scenario. There are thousands of blogs and websites out there which take ages to load. Wise men say that a user will wait only for about 10 seconds before browsing off.
And if your site takes more than 10 seconds to load, the result is obvious –  a lost reader.
So, what do you do about it?
Let us look at 9 Simple ways to speed up your blog’s page load times.
How to Speed up Your Page Load Times
Improving your page load time, is not as difficult as it sounds. There are a few simple tweaks that you can do which can speed up your blog load times considerably.
So you need to first assess your site load speed, which you can do by going to tools.pingdom.com to understand the amount of tweaking you will do.
Check out the below image to see a snapshot for my blog.

Now that you have assessed your site load speed, let us look at some simple tips to improve your site load speeds.
Selecting a Reliable Hosting Provider
Start with your hosting provider and your hosting plan. If you are using a shared host and they run a lot of websites on the same server, then there is no way your site is going to load fast.
Cheap hosting providers often do this and that is one of the primary reasons for a poor loading website.
Ensure that you are hosting your blog with a reliable hosting provider. Bluehost, Hostgator and iPage are some of the best hosting providers as per our experience.
They are reliable and they all provide you with a free CDN which helps in improving the page load times.
Use an Image Compression Plugin
If your blog is an image focussed one, then there is a high possibility that your high quality images are impacting your overall page load times.
Niche blogs in food blogging, fashion blogging etc. where there are a lot of images uploaded to a post, can face this problem.
There are 2 ways to get over it. Firstly, compress the images even before your upload them to your server. You can use a free service like Optimizilla.com to compress the images.