Page load times

[Skolor]

I've noticed something a whole lot of people are doing, and its really gotten to me. They're putting so much crap on their sites it takes way too long to load. Anything over a second or so is too much, and don't go over it. Seriously. Go check your blog, if it takes more than a second to load, you're doing something wrong.


Sure, you may be making money off of it. But is it worth it? If you may a few extra dollars a week off of something, but it makes your page take twice as long to load, it's simply not worth it. If you're honest with yourself, you probably don't have a lot of unique content on your site. If you make users wait too long, you're going to chase them away, they'll be more than capable of finding it elsewhere.


I wrote a rant about this on my blog about Page load time. I'll warn you now, this is actually something I'm pretty pissed about, so I'm a little... Uh, heavy handed on the subject. I do, however, go into some more general guidelines on what you should look at if your page is taking a long time to load.

[Ferox]

ALL pages take way over a second for me to load, so it makes no difference to me personally, and I can't really tell for fast a site is.

What I have been noticing is dropping sidebars. Instead of being on the side, they suddenly drop to being under the posts. This is especially common in 3-column themes, but I've seen it on a few two-column themes too.

[F8soldier]

Normally the use of the too many widgets will slow a blog down no end.

[Skolor]

Originally Posted by Ferox

ALL pages take way over a second for me to load, so it makes no difference to me personally, and I can't really tell for fast a site is.

What I have been noticing is dropping sidebars. Instead of being on the side, they suddenly drop to being under the posts. This is especially common in 3-column themes, but I've seen it on a few two-column themes too.

Yeah, sidebars are the main cause of it. For some reason a lot of people think that because they've got several screen's worth of sidebar space that its a good idea to fill it all up with various ads, to try and squeeze every little cent out of it.

[Bloggeries]

I hear ya man, maybe 1 second is a short interval but if I feel my browser chugging to load your page it's a bad sign. It's like you'd be better putting fewer more targeted ads then thousands. Also depending on how big your main header is. Make it a GIF you don't want some fancy .jpg having to load before your content.

[Skolor]

Originally Posted by Bloggeries

I hear ya man, maybe 1 second is a short interval but if I feel my browser chugging to load your page it's a bad sign. It's like you'd be better putting fewer more targeted ads then thousands. Also depending on how big your main header is. Make it a GIF you don't want some fancy .jpg having to load before your content.

There's a big one. Don't use a .png anywhere at all. There's no reason for it.


I'm using Entrecard right now to simulate a webcomic/blog that updates on specific days, with a fairly dedicated following (I've found that dropping 300 ec on a MWF schedule equates roughly to getting 50 people a day in backdrops). In order to do that, I have to chain drop, and when I was doing that this morning two different pieces of bad Javascript ended up crashing my browser, both had loops that wouldn't finish, and neither were caught by the "script is taking too long function" because there were two of them...

[Ferox]

Bloggeries forum takes about 5 seconds to load I think, so saying 1 second is a bit fast really.

I think NDF takes 5 or 6, but the content loads long before the header.

[magnamatt]

I've pulled most widgets off...A recent web check stated my blog took .53 seconds....although it always seems longer than that.

[Abovearth]

I pulled off some ads and widgets and now everything works smoothly for me, although I have some JPEG images instead of GIF.

[BLOG.TV]

I just wanted to agree. The number of widgets has a major impact on page loading time.