Slow pageloads are evil. Sometimes a poor hosting service or plan is the problem but often there are little things that can destroy your pageload times that you brought upon yourself.
I am not a power web programmer by any stretch of the imagination so this tip would definitely fit under the easy to implement category. If you notice your pages crawling along, take a look at your sidebars, especially if you have a sidebar on the left side.
Check all of your widgets and 3rd party managed blogrolls that you have piled into the sidebars. Each time your page loads, in addition to hitting your own database, it has to connect to each of those 3rd party services and pull data from them. Some services are better than others. Find the ones that are slowing you down. The Firebug plugin for Firefox is a great way to find out how long each element on your page takes to load. Load your page and then look at the Net tab of Firebug.
If your slow elements are loading before the main content, the reader will notice the page loading slowly. One simple fix that usually seems to work is to move those slow elements to the right sidebar (preferably toward the bottom) which is normally loaded after the main content. The page will take the same amount of time to load but the content will get served to the reader much faster and they will hit the back button much less often.
If you are comfortable with CSS, you can use CSS to load your main content column and then the left and right sidebars and keep your favorite slow widgets in the left sidebar, but that’s a little trickier.
Also, when you notice a slow widget or 3rd party service, take a close look at how much benefit you and your reader get out of the widget or badge. Completely removing as many of these slow elements is an even better fix for slow pageloads.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s true. If any site make me wait for >20 sec to load, I will leave the site.
You’d probably get more readers if you didn’t have those obnoxious popup text link ads covering the article.
You are right about the popup text link things. It was an experiment that I was running to see if the annoyance had a pay off anywhere near being worth it. For the record, they don’t. Thanks for the reminder to pull them.
That is so true, so leave the heavy widgets and plugins alone, a lot of people still use IE6 and older computers, 30% of all blogs don’t even work properly in these configurations.
This is extremely helpful. I’ve been long aware on how page loads drive visitors away. I do it myself. I wouldn’t really waste time waiting for a page to load (unless I’m surfing that website for educational purposes) But usually when it’s a blog, I’d close the tab right away.
I remember IE6 that was the worst for me since IE waits for the whole page to load before displaying it. That was annoying.
I agree, I had a problem but I solved it. When I first created A blog I also created an image for Header. I created it in photoshop….and because I wanted to look good I saved it in very high resolution! But that image was more than 500 kb, and I did not realized that not all people having DSL internet connection…that caused very slow site opening….. now I never put an image more then 50 kb on my new blogs…because of that reason! It is not perfect but works better for me!
Ironically this post took like 15 seconds to load, haha. I agree, if it takes too long, I’m moving onto another site. I use WP-Super-Cache plugin for my blog to speed up the code parsing.
I’m not surprised it took a little bit to load. The Taco Bell post is getting a fair amount of StumbleUpon traffic.
Funny you should mention WP-Super-Cache, though. I am currently in the process of moving all of my sites to a host mainly so I can use that plugin. I’m about halfway through…and unfortunately didn’t move this one yet.
I’ve experimented with mysql caching, APC PHP caching, and using WP-Supercache. I highly recommend doing all three if possible. It will speed up your blog tremendously. You have to be using a virtual dedicated or dedicated server to do it, but it is well worth it. If not, you may be able to just install WP-Supercache. You can find it here: http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/ It has the ability to cache a single post, if you get digged and keep your server from dying.