One of the most important factors regarding a blog, is his loading speed.
There are many things that can help minimize your loading speed, I'm gonna talk here about the most important, from my point of view:
- The CSS must be place in the header of the page. Normally, the link to the CSS file is dynamically generated.
- Move all your CSS styles inserted in webpages, in the external file. Everything related to CSS, all attributes, should be in the CSS file.
- Optimize the CSS files. First validate them, and then compress them.
- Load JavaScripts after the CSS inclusion. Also, all scripts that do not need to be loaded from the start, should be moved to the footer of the page.
- Optimize images and specify the size for each of them. Edit images so that they will have low size, but maintain the quality. Also specify all the images the width and height, so that the browser no longer need to wait in order to determine their size.
- Disable hot-linking
- Use gzip compression
- Clean, validate and reduce the HTML code. Delete all unneeded HTML comments and also reduce the unneeded space between lines.
- Remove, where possible, the dynamic display (which uses PHP) of different parameters.
- Remove any unnecessary widgets and plugins. There is no need for calendar, clock and other crap. Also the things that some plugins do, can be done by small code changes in your WordPress site.
- Install a cache plugin. I suggest Hyper Cache or WP-Cache
I hope these tips & tricks help you provide a better user-experience.