Speed Archives - This Week in Blogging

10 Blogging Activities to Perform in Q1 to Start the Year Off Right

January 9, 2023January 10, 2022

Whenever a new year begins, we take the first month or so to take stock of the state of our blogs.

Part of this is because ad rates are so low at the start of Q1 that we're not driven to create content like mad. But the other part is that the new year is simply a good excuse to start new blogging habits to get the year off on the right foot.

But some activities that can be done in Q1 are not necessarily habits that need to be adopted throughout the coming year but are rather one-off tasks that could be accomplished during the downtime as well. So in this one, we thought it'd be fun to share a few back-end blogging tasks you may want to consider doing at the start of the year that you may have slacked on in the past!

WP Rocket Settings – A Guide to Improving Your WordPress Blog

July 5, 2021July 5, 2021

At its core, WordPress is an open-sourced Content Management System (CMS) that is designed to be versatile and accept a wide array of hosts, themes, and plugins.

Much like how it is hard to shuffle a deck of cards and never deal the same hand twice due to the insanely high probability, it is also unlikely that any two blogs are designed identically (well, unless you copy all of our guides and WordPress plugin recommendations, in which case there could be a few).

This poses an inherent set of problems for bloggers as some programs simply aren't designed to play nicely together. Some themes may be designed to stand alone without a huge plugin array while others are simply backbones that allow you to customize to your heart's content via plugins. Optimizing performance around all of this adds one more layer of difficulty into the mix.

One plugin that we have found absolutely critical for the performance of our WordPress blogs is WP Rocket as this premium plugin is a beast- it combines and minifies CSS and JS files, lazy loads images, and so much more.

So in this one, we want to share more about what WP Rocket does, why you may want to use it on your blog, some pitfalls to keep in mind, and of course share our own personal settings as this one can become overwhelming in a hurry.

5 Unique Features of WebPageTest You May Not Be Using

May 24, 2021

When it comes to auditing our blogs, one tool we find ourselves using over and over again is WebPageTest.

This tool has some pretty powerful diagnostic features that go well beyond simply looking at how fast your site loads in a cumulative sense. You really can dive down and look at individual elements as well plus how your site performs on desktop, mobile, and an array of devices to name a few!

So in this one, we wanted to share some unique features of WebPageTest you may not be using (but should). But if you haven't used WebPageTest at all, we recommend starting with our base guide at the previous link!

5 Blogging Tasks to Look at When You’re Burnt Out on Writing

January 11, 2021

Oh, burnout. If you have been blogging for as many years as I have, burnout may as well be your middle name.

At some point, writing for your blog becomes a chore. This could be either in the form of writer's block, being discouraged at your current growth rates, or simply not being able to generate new ideas for your niche (as a travel blogger, I call this 2020).

Thankfully, writing is only one small component of what we as bloggers do. When I find myself dreading putting yet-another word online, I tend to take a step back and look at other activities I may be able to look at which benefit my site but do not necessarily involve writing.

In this one, I wanted to share a few ideas to help you get started if you are suffering from this as well.

How to Improve Your Google PageSpeed Insights Score

September 25, 2023August 17, 2020

Google is fickle when it comes to providing information that can be helpful for publishers. They rarely publish SEO guidelines and are equally silent on algorithm changes overall apart from self-serving tweets from a few key employees.

One tool that Google does provide that website operators can use is PageSpeed Insights. This service is designed to score your site on a 100 point scale which is somewhat analogous to site speed. The higher your score, the “faster” your site is as perceived by Google. Whether this score itself is an SEO factor remains to be seen, but many experts would say that the technical components that go into the score most certainly are. But if we were to ignore this altogether, the simple truth is that if Google shares tools that can help publishers, you'll do well to at least look into it more.

In this guide, we wanted to breakdown how we look at PageSpeed Insights, and highlight several ways you may be able to improve your PSI score as well.

Breaking Down WordPress Blogging Hosts You May Wish to Consider

February 20, 2023July 8, 2020

Hosting is often one of the most widely talked about items when it comes to blogging as it is crucial to your (and your readers') experience when on your site.

You often don't think about it, but every website on the internet takes up file space- generally on the order of 10s to 100s of gigabytes. This has to exist on a piece of hardware somewhere in the world (often multiple times over for redundancy). A host often manages this equipment (or has contracts with those who do) and does all the work necessary to ensure your site can be found at its respective domain. So when you opened up this link, everything that was required to deliver the page you're seeing to your computer screen is likely a function of our host.

We're not going to bore you with the details on how all that happens, but suffice it to say that hosting is one of the most important things every blogger must have because, well, your site simply wouldn't exist without it!

In this guide, we want to break down some of the biggest considerations you should look for in a host, and then give a few recommendations that may be helpful for all budgets.

The Best WordPress Plugins – Speed and Function First

June 18, 2024July 2, 2020

How to Get a Fast Website with Wordpress Plugins

One of the reasons we love blogging on WordPress so much is that the content management system is open source. Want a new theme? There are hundreds if not thousands of developers out there with a product. In the mood for a plugin upgrade? Tens of thousands exist.

While we love this flexibility to always be on the lookout for the next best thing, you can often be met with decision paralysis on what is best for you and why.

To help with that, we wanted to share our list of preferred WordPress plugins that we use and love. As we have prioritized site speed on all of our sites, we are also pretty happy with the below for being lightweight and letting our sites run lightning-fast (but we also have tip our hats to our host, BigScoots, for a bit of that too)!

How to Read WebPageTest Results and Improve Your Blog’s Speed

June 14, 2020June 10, 2020

One of our favorite services to look at our blog's site speed is WebPageTest. This free service provides a wealth of data about your site and really lets you dive down into the individual components that make your blog tick.

In running a test, we know that the amount of data returned in this one can cause information overload. To help, we put together this guide featuring some of the most important elements we look at when optimizing our blogs, what they mean, and potential fixes that you can implement on your own blog for speed improvement!

Note: All website owners can run a test on WebPageTest and analyze results, but some of our recommendations below are targeted purely towards WordPress users.