This is the last post in our “How to Start a Blog Series” here are the first 3 posts:
Ok, so you’ve started your blog, learned some things NOT to do, found out how to become an instant millionaire, and now your audience is growing. GREAT!
Growing Pains
As your traffic increases into the thousands of pageviews per day you may start to notice some issues. Your pages start to load realllly slow, database connection errors, and other annoying things like that.
Congratulations, your blog is growing! While it may feel painful for now, it’s a good thing in the long run, right? Not to worry, there are options out there, and some are cheaper than others.
Site testing/optimization tools
The first service you should take advantage of is pingdom.com. You can set up domain monitoring that will send you an e-mail whenever your website is down (it can check as often as every minute). You can also use tools.pingdom.com to check your pageload times. This can be useful when trying out a new feature – if you see a drastic change in your pageload time, you may want to re-consider the change.
Firebug is a website debugging tool – download it even if you don’t know what that means. Pagespeed and YSlow are Firebug for Firefox plugins that allow you to see pageload times right in your browser, as well as offer suggestions on how to speed up pageload times. This info is invaluable, and if you haven’t started your downloads yet… What are you waiting for?
Tips to lower your pageload time (for free)
If you’ve ever posted an image on your site using a URL from another site (tinypic.com, some random image from Google, or another blogger’s website), you’re not alone. Lots of bloggers do it. If you want your site to speed up, you should stop doing that NOW. The problem is that if the site you link to goes down, all of a sudden your site is affected.
Rule #1: Upload all images to your own server.
Rule #1a: If you are going to re-size the picture, do it before you upload. If you just use the percentage scale to make the image smaller, your server is still serving up the full-size image.
We all like to have links to every possible affiliate program in our sidebar, as well as links to all of our favorite blogs, our family, our dog’s personal website, etc. But every single item takes time to serve and time to render – keep it to a minimum. Not many readers enjoy a cluttered site. Any widget codes should be done away with if possible – they are served from somewhere else and thus are out of your control. One good way to minimize the amount of stuff on your sidebar is to use Adrotator or Datafeedr Random Ads v2 – you can put the ad code in one spot and have your ads rotate through; that way you can show all your ads, but your sidebar won’t be so cluttered.
Rule #2: Minimize sidebar clutter
Plugins are part of what makes WordPress so awesome – there’s a plugin for almost everything. But you have to be careful; plugins can cause conflicts that bring your site down. Every plugin you install also increases your pageload time (some a lot, some a little). De-activating plugins is not enough – if you aren’t going to use it, delete it.
Rule #3: Purge your plugins (delete unused or unnecessary plugins)
Speeding up your site (not free, but worth it)
The first upgrade I would recommend to any blog (assuming you’re on shared hosting like BlueHost) is to start using a caching plugin and a CDN (Content Delivery Network). On typical shared hosting your site is served off of one computer (a server). Let’s say it’s in New York. Everyone in California has a bit of a wait time while your server handles their request. Along comes the CDN – they take your content and put it on servers all over the country. When someone visits your site, the CDN automatically picks the closest server and delivers your web content to them. Another benefit is that the CDN will offload a lot of the burden from your webhost – since they’re serving your site from their servers, your webhost isn’t doing as much anymore. If you’re on a shared host, adding a CDN service could help you stay on shared hosting for a lot longer (next step is a VPS, which is considerably more than shared hosting). Don’t worry, using a CDN is really easy if you do it the right way. I’ll explain in a minute.
Caching plugins
I recommend W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. W3 is a more complete package, but if you need another option, WP Super Cache will work just fine. Both of those plugins support CDN integration, making it ridiculously easy to implement (and eliminating your first excuse to not do it).
CDN Service
Here at TFF, we use MaxCDN. Right now you get your first 1 TB of data for $39.95 – normally $70.00. For us, 1 TB will last about 6 months, so $12 per month to greatly improve our pageload times is definitely worth it. The whole integration took me maybe 30 minutes to do using this tutorial.
Wait, I need more than shared hosting!
Not to worry – you can still use caching and CDN when you step up your hosting. The next step up is a VPS (Virtual Private Server). Basically you get a bigger (dedicated) portion of a server than shared hosting, without using a whole server (thus saving you money). At this time we use Wiredtree for our hosting needs, we are using a Hybrid Server. They helped with my entire migration from my previous host at no extra charge. One thing I really like about Wiredtree is that they offer VPS packages, a Hybrid package (between VPS and a full server) and full server packages. Switching webhosts is something I prefer not to do (but Wiredtree is the fourth host we’ve had TFF on). I’m just excited that if we get to the point where we need a dedicated server, they can handle that for me too.
A word of warning: when you start looking for a VPS (or better) hosting, you will come across some SUPER cheap prices. Typically those are NOT managed servers. What does that mean? It basically means if your server goes down, you get to figure it out. Unless you are a network administrator, you want a MANAGED hosting solution.
This is the last post in our “How to Start a Blog Series” here are the first 3 posts:
Samantha Clattenburg via Facebook September 8, 2011 at 9:02 am
LOL!!! Nice. Are you maybe the most altruistic blogger perhaps?
The Frugal Find via Facebook September 8, 2011 at 9:04 am
Haha, I’m not quite sure how to respond to that – but you’re welcome?
lindy October 2, 2011 at 9:20 pm
Wow!! I’m still on step 1! I started a blog because i was tired of texting everyone, but there is more to it than meets the eye. Kudos on a job well done on your blog.