Slow website? Webenso has never had great performance, but adding the social media buttons has really slowed things down. Addressing my website performance has been on my to-do list for a while, so it was perhaps serendipitous that I caught a short presentation from Michelle Zatlyn from CloudFlare last night on improving blog performance.
You do need to care about your website speed. Not only because your users aren’t going to stick around for a website that takes 10 seconds or more to load, but it’s bad for SEO as well. Over a year ago, Google announced they would be taking page load time into account for their ranking algorithms.
CloudFlare originally was conceived as a way to block hacker and spam bot traffic to make your website more secure. Michelle quickly got the feedback that any solution they came up with needed to avoid slowing things down. So CloudFlare now has a dual purpose, it looks for “bad” traffic and filters that away from your website, and it speeds up your website’s performance as well. The CloudFlare approach is a little different than the standard remedies for slow websites, it’s not about changing your javascript to load asynchronously or hosting social media button images or installing caching on WordPress (which are all things you should still consider). What CloudFlare does is become a proxy for your website, it caches your pages and can serve your site from it’s datacenters around the world. So instead of someone from Hong Kong requesting your site from its hosting location in the USA, they will get it from the CloudFlare’s Asian datacenter much quicker. Your website — served from distributed locations from around the world — for free. Cool huh?
The All in One SEO WordPress plugin is a very popular plugin. Many install it so that they have the ability to customize their post’s page title. This is very useful to do from the SEO perspective. Your post title should be written for your reader and be catchy, your 
Why would I want to do this? Let’s put the SEO factor aside for a moment. As a blogger you of course want people to get value from your blog, read several posts and return. A high bounce rate means that most of your visitors just visited the single page they originally landed on and then left your blog. Of course if the article answered their question completely that would be a good thing, even if they left without browsing further. This is more difficult to measure, but you can look at time spent on the site as another clue.
