Keep Your Blog in Tip Top Shape
This post brought to you by the letter “D” and the number “7″. D is for Dan who’s an almost thirty web developer and blogger hailing from the Great North and 7 for the number of paragraphs you will be subjected you to.
Let’s face it… all the stuff you heard about setting up your own website being difficult was not true. Most blog owners are not tech-savvy people and everyone including your grandmother has a website now. My websites have evolved over time and transitioned through various blogging platforms giving me a taste of what options everyone has when they choose to put up a site. One of the things I’ve learned is that while it’s nice to have all the newest and coolest widgets, plugins and advertisements on your website you have to keep in mind that the more fancy things you add the more that has to load for every viewer who comes to visit. The key thing to having a website is to keep it running smoothly and provide readers with a pleasant experience.
For every widget that you add to your website you are adding one more call to an external website every time your page loads. You must also remember that if one of these external websites is experiencing problems it will directly affect the loading time of your own website. A perfect example of this would be any blogger who uses a twitter plugin to display their tweets or whatever they’re called (I do not use twitter). I do know however that the twitter website experiences above average downtime.
I placed twitter on a client’s website and he then asked why his website would no longer load and sure enough the broken website corresponded with a twitter “maintenance” message on their website. Removing the plugin brought back the website. Now
if you have 15 plugins on your website all relying on similar connections it can drastically slow down your website.
A great tool for evaluating your website’s loading speed is gomez. Gomez will measure the number of connections your website makes and using a bar graph it will show you how long each connection lasted. If you are experiencing weird load times or partial loads drop your URL into the form and choose a city to run the test from and let it do its magic.
If you are a blogger then you most likely surf social networks and read other blogs. Put yourself in a reader’s perspective when looking at your own website. Think about the things that bother you when you read other sites and see if you can spot them on your own. I’m sure you’ve all come across sites that partially load, or crawl to the screen in bits and pieces. In most cases you’ve either finished the article before the site finishes loading or move on to the next because it took too long.
Keeping your readers on your site is important and with the speed of the internet you only have a few seconds to make that impression so keep your content free from clutter. The first thing people see when they arrive on your page is your site and its content. Advertisements should blend in with their surroundings. Avoid tricking your readers into clicking ads. It is sneaky and only interferes with a nice seamless browsing experience.
In my opinion the last thing you should keep in mind is to be personal. I know for me at least as a blogger and reader, sites that give off a feeling that somebody is behind the wheel makes me feel more comfortable. Too many people put their sites on auto-pilot. If you are going to take the time to read someone’s blog the least they can do is acknowledge and reply. Make sure you install subscribe-to-comments which enables yor readers to be notified after they’ve left their opinion and gone home. With so many sites out there its hard to keep track of everything you comment on and having a reminder emailed is a great touch in retaining your readers.
Return to the sites you’ve visited and continue to comment. It is the bain of your existence as a web surfer and will keep people coming back for more. Refer to Alex’s Commentluv post for a great tutorial on commenting techniques.
Serial-Box has been Dan’s stomping ground and online home for nearly two years. It began with his obsession for true crime and grew into something more. Some of the notable topics discussed are the wrongful convictions of innocent people, men and women who’ve been sentenced to life imprisonment or death for crimes they didn’t commit. He is a web developer located in Toronto, Canada and spends his free time glued to his laptop and always learning new things. He won’t stop until he hits the end of the internet.
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21 Responses to “Keep Your Blog in Tip Top Shape”
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[...] it takes for your blog to load? Alex over at HowToSpoter wrote a great post about this at Keep Your Blog in Tip Top Shape – it includes the excellent [...]
Interesting point here. I have a few blogs going myself and I wondered why one was running particularly slow – Time to check the plugins I think!
hey olly. I suggested the same to Barbara … if you don’t already have the wp-supercache plugin installed I highly suggest adding it. It will turn all your PHP pages into HTML pages. PHP is only served if someone logs in or leaves a comment. it will drastically reduce loading time on your blogs.
Wonderful post and very timely as well. I’ve noticed that whenever I surf off of my blog and then press the back-button, the entire thing reloads – would you have any suggestions as to why that happens (ie, it doesn’t get put into cache)?
Thanks and stumbled,
Barbara
Hi Barbara,
Thank you for your comments. I decided to write this article because my own site is suffering from poor load times periodically and Im trying to nail down the problem.
I visited your site (very nice btw) and on the first load everything came up fine. I was also able to surf through pages and hit the back button without having to reload everything. Does this happen for your site only or all sites you surf? Its possible your browser is set to empty/delete the cache when you close the browser.
I also highly suggest that you install the wp-supercache plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/pl.....per-cache/) . What this does is create an HTML version of every page when someone visits it and then Wordpress will serve the HTML page to viewers instead of using PHP resources to process requests. Only when someone logs in or leaves a comment will Wordpress take over and serve PHP pages. This plugin has been a life saver. The only requirements to use this plugin is that your host supports symbolic links.
I hope this helps and if you have any other questions don’t hesitate!
15 plugins calling external website? wow, on top of my head I can only think of three. But these days speed is no longer the deciding factor. This blog for example is not exactly a fast loader but I’d still prefer to check here if I want to have a quick look on the net between work.
But you are right, if the plugins stop the page loading then it sucks, have it two or three times and be sure to loose visitors.
Thanks dan, I’m gonna surf around and find out what are those 15 plugins
Thanks for all the feedback guys,
Dan has done a great job on this post! Thank you!
@tonyran – yeah .. I know of the load speed, I had to actually do some changes on my VPS and simply don’t have time to turn the optimization back on as it requires some code recompile.
Alex
Wow…this is very important. I always test out my sites on pingdom to check for speed and can agree that widgets/plugins can really slow down if there are too many.
Susans last blog post..How to Get an Offer Accepted on a Short Sale
I’ve noticed that blogs with a huge amount of plug-ins often do run slower than those without. It’s a trade-off, really; speed for extended functionality. Although some people put up plug-ins that don’t really have a useful purpose, and those are the ones that need to be removed.
You are 100% right. Ive come to tolerate an acceptable amount of slowness on my own site for certain functionality but as you said it’s the useless plugins that cause problems.
everyone’s making plugins for everything and most of them are just extra weight. always make sure you uninstall plugins you dont plan on using anymore too.
>You must also remember that if one of these external websites is experiencing problems it will directly affect the loading time of your own website. A perfect example of this would be any blogger who uses a twitter plugin to display their tweets or whatever they’re called (I do not use twitter). I do know however that the twitter website experiences above average downtime.
Well I see that you do seem to be twittering now, so what did you discover with it affecting your blog and load time?
I am not twittering yet, but considering it. Do you have a post about twitter and its business use?
By the way, what about the Peel Ad did it cause any slow downs? I just added it to my blog yesterday and now I see this morning that I can not be my site to load at all. Don’t know if the peel ad has anything to do with that or not.
I just tested my home page at gomeznetworks.com and got this:
Object Response Time Data
Total Response Time: 5.214
Total Bytes: 190009
32 Connections
I don’t know if that is good or bad or in the middle range.
32 Connections does seem too much but many of them seem to be the same…
Connection 26 – alove4horses.com (66.40.65.241) Connection 0.157 66.40.65.241 0.078 175
Connection 27 – alove4horses.com (66.40.65.241) Connection 0.158 66.40.65.241 0.078 243
Connection 28 – alove4horses.com (66.40.65.241) Connection 0.162 66.40.65.241 0.078 680
Connection 29 – alove4horses.com (66.40.65.241)
Oh, boy, more to study and learn. When do you find the time for all of this?
Jonis last blog post..Horses Stories, Poems, and Writing
Thank for your info about gomez com speed test. I hope now I can make a blog or website with more speed to download by using this tools
dewajis last blog post..Busby SEO Challenge
Interesting points.By only using the plugins and widgets you really need and not using too many pictures (large ones) you will speed up the loading time a lot.It´s funny how intolerant people are online if a site takes more than 5 seconds to load they head elsewhere
Toms last blog post..How To Place Adsense Code On A Wordpress Blog
This needed to be said. For a while I wanted readers to be able to come to my news blog and be able to sip their coffee as they scrolled down and read the headlines. In addition to this I wanted my blog to call out to analytics, quantcast, adsense, adbrite, and a few other ad networks. In the end, my scrollbar was tiny and the page load time was horrible. I decided to go with 8 stories max and only the ad networks that seemed worth it.. since then my bounce rate has decreased and my subscriptions have increased.
First of all, I love my major. Chinese literature is the symbol of the start of Chinese literary modernization. It plays an important part in modernization of our citizens’ thoughts. What’s more, modern literature is very close to our daily life and it can deeply reflect the styles and features of our society. I am fascinated by the great masters’ refreshing or warm or profound styles as well. But I am not easily satisfied with such superficial knowledge. I hope I could have a better understanding in modern literature by studying further. This is a very important reason for me to take the postgraduate exams.
Next, I love the feeling in the university. It is full of youthful spirit. And I am deeply attracted by the scholarly atmosphere. And the most important, it’s my great honor to open my ears to your teaching.
Finally, I want to talk about a very practical problem. That is my dream of becoming a teacher in the university. I want to realize my dream and make myself to be a well-qualified person. I think the postgraduate studies can enrich my knowledge and make me competent in my future job.
That’s my simple and clear reasons why I took the postgraduate exams
coy from http://www.watchinstyle.com
I don’t have a huge amount of widgets on my site, and for end users it seems to run ok. It’s the admin side of things that is painfully slow sometimes, especially when I post a new article – I think this is due to having pingbacks enabled – but this is such a useful feature and one which I’m sure I would regret turning off.
toms last blog post..CSS shadows – A drop shadow roundup
Nice point about plugins on your blog – I never thought about how it affects speed of a blog loading – I wiill go see what wordpress plugins I can trim down!
William Gardners last blog post..My first post from an iPhone
I tried a new ad program that just killed my load time so I had to remove it as a number of people were starting to complain. I know with Entrecard that whether I continue to drop on a site or not has a lot to do with how fast or how slow the blog loads.
untreatables last blog post..William Balfour Jennifer Hudson Suspect
In my opinion Entrecard is a waste of your resources. IN most cases the sites that are displayed on entre card are of low quality and there really isn’t any value in those links. I find for myself at least that I never click on random images or links when visiting other sites therefore entrecards just take up space and slow down the website.
Your intellect is showing up in this article. I will be perusing more from you in this blog!