This is the first of a series of posts designed to discuss ways to monitor and improve your blog’s performance. 

If you run a lower traffic blog and are looking to increase your readership, there are several things you can do to help people find your blog.   The problem is, once they’ve found your website, it can sometimes be difficult to retain them as a reader.  This is especially true if most of your traffic comes from search engines or sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

Whether you believe it or not, website performance actually plays a big part in keeping that unique visitor’s attention long enough to read your content.   If your website takes to long to load, it is unlikely that your potential reader will even stay long enough to see the full page load.

Luckily, there are several free tools to help you monitor your blog’s load time and figure out what is slowing it down.  The site I use primarily is called OctaGate SiteTimer.  Simply enter your blog’s URL, click Start, and it will do a quick check and display the results.  This whole process can be completed in 15-20 seconds!

Other sites that accomplish the same or similar goals are:

This should give you a good idea of what hangups are taking place when your website is loading.  Your goal should be to have your website load in under 7 seconds.   If it is taking longer, give some consideration to removing the culprits, which will usually be extra widgets appearing somewhere on your blog (MyBlogLog widget, Alexa widget, BlogCatalog widget, Good Blogs, Blogrush, etc.).   Also, some advertising services may add to your page load time if they are a smaller service with servers that have trouble handling the load.