It can be pretty boring to have small social bookmarking icons which most of bloggers use at the end of their post. It will also not bring any excitement for our blog readers to click on them to help us to promote our blog post.

So, for today post, I would like to share a quick and straightforward tutorial on how can you use your preferred social bookmarking icons that you found in the internet and put them at the end of every blog post in your WordPress blog.

Here is the example of the effect that you will get when you use below tutorial on your WordPress blog.

If you bring your cursor on the icon, it will turn to grey.

Cool right?

The quick tutorial…

First, you have to open your CSS file and add below code into it. You can the code anywhere but it is advisable to put it after last code line in the CSS file so that it would be easier to delete if you want to in the future.

For the image file that I have highlighted in red is for the horizontal grey line that you can find on the top and bottom of the social icons. While for the image file highlighted in yellow, it is the most important image that you need to have for this tutorial as it is the image of the social icons.

To personalize the social icons section for your WordPress blog, you can replace both images with your own but do make sure that the images that you are going to replaced have the same size with the previous ones. If not, you may need to adjust slightly the above code.

If you do not want to use your icons and want to use the same icons like the above, you can download the image from the link below. Then, you have to upload the image into the images folder which is located under theme that you are using. (Public html>WP Content>Themes>Your Themes>Images)

Social Icons

And for the icons, you can find the icons that you love by searching them in the internet. However, you may find the icons that you will love from the post that I have posted before.

Top 13 Perfect Designed Hand Drawn Social Bookmarking Icons

Then, after you have finished with your editing in the CSS file, you now have to open the single.php file for you to place social icons in every post of your WordPress blog.

You have to find <?php the_content(); ?> inside single.php as it represents your blog post. Then, if you want to have the social icons on top of your blog post, you have to add social icons code that I am going to give you in a moment before the <?php the_content(); ?>. But, if you want it after your blog post, you have to add the social icons code after the <?php the_content(); ?>.

Download below file:

Code – Social Icons for WordPress

After you have added the code, hit save button and refresh your blog.

Now, you will have your very own personalized fancy social bookmarking icons in your WordPress blog.

The ending…

Do you have your own personalized social icons for your WordPress blog or use the icons that you get by using WordPress plugin? Which one do you prefer and will work well with you?

For me, I prefer to have my own personalized social icons. How about you?

Ensuring our WordPress blog is at its optimum speed is crucial as it will affect the very first impression of our blog visitors as site loading is the very first thing they will have to face before they can enjoy our blog post.

If the loading time is terribly slow, it will definitely piss our readers off and most important thing if they are your ‘first-time’ site visitors. They will probably never come back or cannot find your blog whenever if they want to especially if they come from the search engines.

So, for today post I would love to share 8 really simple and basic ways to reduce your WordPress blog loading time. I have tried my best to reduce all those technical stuffs in the list so that you have no problem to understand the ways to improve the loading time of your WordPress blog.

Enjoy!

1. Upgrade to the latest WordPress version

This is pretty obvious. WordPress will never release any new version of WordPress if it will not make your WordPress blog better. Sometimes, it makes me wonder why some of us hesitate to upgrade their WordPress blog.

It is plain easy as you just need to click the update button and everything else will be done for you. It only takes less than a minute.

p/s: Have you upgraded to the latest WordPress version that has just been released?

2. Delete unused plugins

You must not used unnecessary amount of plugins for your WordPress blog and you have to deleted theme form the server. It is because it can dramatically affect the speed of your WordPress blog as it may contain tons of scripts and codes.

Remember this – blog with more features is not necessarily a blog that people will love. Sometimes, simplicity is the king.

Ask yourselves – do your blog need such great amount of plugins to be a better blog?

3. Install WP Super Cache Plugin

I am pretty sure that you have heard about this plugin as there are a lot of blogs out there that regard this plugin as a must have plugin for a WordPress blog.

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

In none technical words, it will use the ‘image’ of your site and use it each time your readers visit your blog instead of has to process same data each time your readers visit your blog. So, it will reduce the burden of your server and therefore, your WordPress blog can process faster.

Download WP Super Cache

4. Install WP CSS

With this plugin GZIP and strip whitespace from your CSS files. It allows you to confidently use @import inside a CSS file and not worry about what happens on the user’s end. It will look through your style.css file and put any @import files into it.

For those who are not familiar with the above technical stuff, may find it hard to understand. The important thing you should know is it can definitely make your WordPress blog faster.

(Tests were measured using a Firefox plugin called Firebug. Firefox was run a Mac Pro (2008) using OS X 10.5.3. Eight CSS files that were being included in this test: typography.css, form.css, list.css, special.css, skin.css, menu.css, other.css, sIFR-screen.css – all created to simulate an average size of a typical website.)

Download WP CSS

5. Rid Off Hotlinking

Hotlinking can a really huge problem if there are a lot sites hotlinked with your WordPress blog. They will drag down your WordPress blog as they will make your server load increasingly high.

For those who do not know about hotlink, hotlink is a term that is being coined when someone else/site uses data especially images from your site. So, although others are visiting the blogs that have hotlinked you, the images that come out in their blogs will be from your server. So, it will increase the bandwidth usage excessively.

Sometimes, hotlinking is called bandwidth theft.

Below is how you can prevent hotlinking in your site through .htaccess file:

You just need update the .htacces file and change the domain name above with yours. The last line is an image that will display instead of the hotlinked image– how about an advert for your site?

6. Turn Off Post Revision

WordPress starts to have Post Revision feature after it launched the 2.6 version of WordPress. Although it has its advantages, it also comes with disadvantages.

One of the disadvantages is whenever a post is edited, a new row will be created in wp_posts table. Hence if your posts or pages got edited 10 times, you will have 10 new rows in wp_posts table.

In no time your wp_posts table will be filled up and the post ID will be huge.

To know how you can riff off this feature, Lester Chan has covered this topic in details.

7. Reduce Image Size

Images make our blog post looks great but it can also come with cost. Images that are in high resolution will use a lot of bandwidth and therefore affect your WordPress blog’s loading time.

With WP Smush.it, it will help you to reduce the size of images in your WordPress blog by reducing its quality with no obvious impact on the images.

Download WP Smush.it

8. Optimize Your WordPress Blog Database

Just like a computer, we have to defragment the database of our WordPress blog and to ensure in to be clutter free.

This process can be done manually and automatically through WordPress plugin.

For manual process, you have to locate the database of your WordPress in myPhpAdmin, select all the tables in the Check Boxes, select the Optimise Tables Option.

For automatic process, you have to install easy to use WordPress plugin called Optimize Database by Joost De Valk of Yoast.com. After you have downloaded it, just hit the ‘Optimize Now’ button.

This is very useful for tables that are frequently updated.

Do you have any suggestion?

Do you have any suggestion on the ways that you have used to increase the speed of your WordPress blog? I am sure that I have missed some of them. How about you help me out? I would really appreciate it.