Thursday, November 15, 2012

Thursday Review—Help Your Blog Load Faster with Jump Breaks

With the latest tweaks to search engine algorithms, how fast your blog takes to load is now factored into a site's ranking. What does that mean for you? If you have a slow loading site (one that takes longer than a second or two to show up onscreen), you'll be penalized.



But don't worry. There are some tricks you can use to cut down on loading time. One of the easiest is by inserting a jump break into your blog posts. It doesn't matter what platform you use to blog, Blogger, WordPress or Typepad. All the major blog hosts have this option.



It's easy to insert a jump break into a post. The screen shot above shows what the jump break icon looks like. The pink arrow is pointing it out. All you have to do is compose your post like normal. I go ahead and add my pictures as well. They can also slow down loading time, so you only want to include one before the jump break. Don't leave a picture out though. It's still important to have one picture show up in the preview of your post.

You also don't have to worry about that gray line. It's not visible to your readers, only to you in compose mode. The front page of your blog is more compact when you use jump breaks in your posts. As you can see in the screen shot below, when my blog opens there's just a preview of the blog posts. The read more option at the end of each preview is a clickable link that takes the reader to the full post.


Here's a shot of what my blog looks like with a page-full of previews. 

As you can see, it's a simple process to add jump breaks to your blog. If you have any questions, be sure to post them in the comments section below.

And don't forget to join the conversation!
Blessings,
Edie

14 comments:

  1. Definitely need to try this. I have had problems just this week with my blog loading. Thanks Edie!

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  2. I was amazed at how much it speeded up my loading time. Thanks for stopping by! Blessings, E

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  3. How do you know all of this stuff? :) You're such a social media guru. Love it!

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    1. I like to play around with the tools I use. Experimenting with Blogger and deciphering what all the icons in the toolbar were for helped me discover this one! I like to think of myself as naturally curious...my husband calls it naturally nosy. LOL! Blessings, Edie

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  4. Believe it or not, I learned about them from my webmaster. Finally something I was already familiar with! Yay!

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  5. I loved this post, but I have to say I'm kind of lost! And as for Lindsay's comment, you're the social media quene! And you can tell your husband that naturally curious sounds a lot better than his theory of naturally nosy! :-) Love you!

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  6. Where is the best place to insert a jump break, or does it matter?

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    1. I try to insert it after the first or second paragraph and after ONE picture. That way it's not too large on my homepage. Thanks for stopping by!

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  7. Ellen, I have the same question. Most of my posts are very short, so I'm not sure it would benefit me to add a jump break. Edie, can you give us some guidelines?

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    1. Julia, I think you're right. Your posts are short enough to not need them. If you do happen to write a longer post about something, I recommend you put one in. It will keep all the posts uniform on your homepage.

      Also, I love the way you utilize photography with your blog. It's a great site to hang out on! Thanks so much for stopping by, Blessings, E

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    2. Thanks for the compliment, Edie - I just sent a wandering would-be blogger to this site. He asked for advice about getting started and I told him this was the place to be for info!

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  8. I'll have to try jump breaks. What is considered "short enough" not to need one?
    Also, you mentioned how your blog gives a preview first and then you offer a clickable link to the entire post. How do you set it up to do that? The Write2Ignite leadership team wants to set the W2I blog up that way but we're uncertain how to do it. We want to give a preview in emails to subscribers and a link to zip them on over to the blog.
    Thanks Edie!

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  9. Thanks Edie. Which icon do I look for in Wordpress

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