Blogger is one of the most popular blogging platforms on the internet. One of the key feature in this perspective is that the platform offers free services allowing blog owners to begin for free without any standby charges. The only way one has to spend for on blogger blog is when it comes to buying a custom domain, but for the content management and security, Blogger offers for free.
Just like anything "free", the use of blogger for blogging comes with so many challenges, especially when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and user interphase (UI). This is because unlike other content management platforms like WordPress, there is no flexibility on blogger such as plugging service to manipulate sites appearance and tools to increase site's speed.
Another challenge in using Blogger for blogging is that Google had not made any significant change on the platform for years which would improve the platform's performance. The sluggishness of Google to improve Blogger as it does to its other products is attributed to the fact that Blogger is free and Google stands to gain nothing much from investing on it. Surprisingly, Google has added features which would mean so much to Blogger users and improve websites SEO.
Blogger Features to Boost the Speed and SEO of Your Website:
1. Automated WebP Image Serving:
This feature turns your blog image from whatever format you rendered to WebP format. WebP is the new generation image format that provides high image quality in a compressed form that can open faster than other image format.Blogger accepts image formats .jpg/.jpeg, .png, and .gif. Unfortunately, some of these image formats like the .png take large space that slows down website's load time which affects sites' SEO. Blogger WebP image serving function turns on your image to .WebP format irrespective of its original extension, allowing your site to load faster. Prior to this time, SEO experts had to use external tools to convert their images to a form that can be SEO friendly, but with WebP serving, your blog speed is going to improve significantly.
ii. Select settings.
iii. Go to WebP image servings.
iv. Turn on the WebP image serving button and save.
How to Turn on WebP Image Serving on Blogger to Boost Speed
i. Login to your blogger dashboard.ii. Select settings.
iii. Go to WebP image servings.
iv. Turn on the WebP image serving button and save.
2. Lazy Load Images Feature
Images slow down website speed, especially when they are large size and in formats that are not SEO friendly. When a page has many images, it takes time to open all the image at a time which leads to load time increase. This is where lazy load function comes in.Lazy load function is a blogger feature that allows images to open one after the other as users scroll through the blog content. What this simply means is that when a user reads a blog content, only the first image loads while others remain unserved until the reader swipes through the content to the position of the each of the remaining images.
Lazy load is not only about images but all blog content especially images and videos are opened only when they are needed. Failure to render everything at once is good for SEO and site's speed because speed is affected by content size which is much larger when all content opens at once.
How to Use Lazy Load Feature on Blogger
- Go to blogger dashboard
- Navigate to settings
- Scroll down to lazy load and turn it own
WebP serving and lazy load are just two of the most amazing blogger features that are effective in boosting your website speed. When a blog has good speed and opens faster, it is easily optimized by the search engine. This is because site speed improves users experience, responsiveness and mobile friendliness which as major SEO factors.
