Add Expires Headers Blogger | Speed up Blog Loading Time

You only have a very short time to make your first impression on your readers. I appreciate that you might have a stunning design, catchy images, and valuable content etc. but still, if your blog will take too much time to load then people will surely gonna leave your site. Nowadays, every blog owner is competing with each other to boost their page loading time. Here in this post, I'm going to present you how you can speed up your blog loading time by adding Expires headers.

Add Expires headers blogger — 
Blogger used to ask these questions on Google; What is an Expires Header? How to set up expires hHeaders on your blogger website? How can I make my blogger load faster? How to speed up web page loading time? How do I increase WordPress speed? How can I increase my website speed? How do I add expired headers in WordPress? How do I minimize HTTP requests in WordPress? And so on... 

In today's high-speed internet world, no one wanna wait, so try to get maximum blog loading speed both for desktop and mobile as well. Your visitors can bare with you for a couple of seconds. If your page does not get loaded quickly, your visitors will leave for sure. 

In old days, you might have a simple HTML file for your blog which might have few images, some infographics etc. to serve needs of your readers. But, you might have enhanced and had turned your blog to the modern website. And now, you could have 50-60+ files on your single page. The files themselves take some time to load. Even-though request-response takes the fraction of a second to load those files, yet it will be high if you add them up altogether.

Add Expires Headers Blogger

Add Expires headers in blogger website

Before moving ahead with how to add expires headers for your blogger, we need to know more about it like what it is? how does it work? why use it? etc.

What is Expire Header?

Expire headers are related to webpage elements such as CSS, javascript, images, etc. What it does? it tells your browser that, whether they have to request a particular file from the server or whether it can be taken from browser's cache itself. 

Adding Expire Header in your HTML leads to reduce request-response time between your browser and server. As a result of this, if you test your web page loading time with the free mobile speed testing tools, it'll be clear that; it not just reduces loads of downloads from the server but also it helps to reduce number of HTTP requesttowards the server. 

How does Expire Header work?

The 'Expires Headers' tell your browser about for how long a file has to be stored in the cache. Due to which, on subsequent page views, your visitors don't have to download the files, again and again. 

It might take some time to load your website for the first time where visitor browser would take time to download all the files from the server. But using Expires Headers, it may help to decrease load times for returning visitors for sure.

Why use 'Expire Header'?

Below are a couple of reasons behind why to use Expire Headers.

1. Reduce server load.
2. Decrease page load time.
3. Reduce HTTP requests.
4. Effective re-use of the cache files.

How to add 'Expires Headers' for your blog website?

Before implementing this step, first check your blog template first with with GTmetrix. Enter your blog URL and click on Analyzebutton. Wait for few minutes, it will analyze and display your blog performance report on screen. You may note this result so that it will help you compare after you implement steps to add expires headers. 

Add below code right above </head>code in your blogger HTML template.

<include expiration='7d' path='*.css'/>
<include expiration='7d' path='*.js'/>
<include expiration='3d' path='*.gif'/>
<include expiration='3d' path='*.jpeg'/>
<include expiration='3d' path='*.jpg'/>
<include expiration='3d' path='*.png'/>
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="sat, 02 jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT"/>

Now, save your HTML blogger template, and check template preview. 

If everything is working fine on your website preview, again check your performance report from GTmetrix site. You may compare latest results with the one you took before adding Expires headers.

NOTE:
I’m sure by adding Expires header, you will definetely going to reduce server load, it also helps to decrease page loading timeand reduce multiple HTTP requests. 

However, if you are facing any error while implementing this method or something you want to suggest apart from the above information, feel free to use below comment section to get in touch with me anytime. Happy to hear from you and to implement the suggestions for helping others