Webby Thoughts

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.