BootsnAll Travel Community

Here are some strategies for speeding up your blog if it takes a long time to load.

Firstly, if your entries are longer than a paragraph or two use the 'more' feature which will only show a small amount of your entry on the home page and provide readers with a link to read the rest on another page. This will make your home page shorter and therefore faster to load.

How to do this can be found here

Secondly, and the biggest reason a page is slow to load is the images. While they may not appear to be very big on the page, many image can be over 2MB. If you move some of the images so that they will appear on the actual entry page rather than the home page (moved them below the 'more' line) and this will do wonders for the speed of your site to load.

If you're editing your photos before you put them up on the site, make sure you save them to a web-safe size (40-50KB per photo). If you're not editing them before uploading, then I would recommend using the thumbnail feature and linking to the bigger image.

How to do that is explained here

Lastly, I would recommend turning off the rich text editor. If you have been creating your entries in a Word doc or something like Word before pasting them into your blog entry page, the editor adopts the stylings inside of Word, which results in a whole bunch of useless code that can weigh your page down. Removing the rich text editor will give you a more text-based editing page and you can copy and paste from Word without any problems. To turn it off, go to your profile page, scroll to the bottom and uncheck the box under Personal Options. Then save your profile.

If you started a BootsnAll travelblog after July 2006, the rich text editor is turned off by default. You can always turn it on again by reversing the above step at any time.

If you store your images on Flickr, you can chose to upload a smaller size to your blog, at least last time I checked.

BTW, the original size of my avatar is 2MB or something. Looks OK even in this tiny form. Thumbnails make nice links to click on to take the reader to bigger images (perhaps straight to Flickr).