Saturday, November 24, 2007

Please Don't Give Up On My SLOW Loading Blog

I had plans for today, take back some shoes for my daughter and various other bits and pieces, but things didn't quite work out that way as I woke up with the headache from hell.

After some paracetamol and several strong cups of tea I was pleased and surprised it lifted so easily, so often I get headaches which last for days no matter what I take.

However by this time I had decided not to go out at all, but to stay home in the warm with my baby (my laptop).

Spent lots of time reading blogs, listening to music, and making a few changes on my blog, some of which I'm sure you would have noticed by now.

Today I found my blog has been taking FOREVER to load, far longer than normal. I know some people have said it's because I have too many widgets, but I don't think I have an inordinate amount - do I?

Because of the slow loading I have removed a few of the lesser useful widgets and also pared down the existing ones, such as having less visitors showing in them. All in an effort to improve loading time, but to me is hasn't made too much difference which is rather annoying as I don't want readers to be put off.. and they will be, because if I visit a blog which is taking too long to load I might presume it to be broken and leave.

Let me know how it loads for you please, and if by any chance you have ideas to speed it up they would be most gratefully received!
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11 COMMENTS, PLEASE ADD YOURS :):

  1. It takes about 15 seconds or so for it to load on my computer, but I don't mind. I'll wait. I click on yours in my google reader, then go back and read something else, then come back to yours. No big deal.
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  2. It takes a little while to load, and it probably is the widgets. But they're so much fun!

    I love the new header!
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  3. I like your new header....your blog was loading really slow this past week....but nothing that scares me away.
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  4. It does take a while to load, I almost went onto another blog because I thought there was nothing created on it yet. Although the widgets are fun, I'd rather read what you've written. Glad I waited to see you do have reading.
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  5. It takes a fair while to load for me, too. Don't think it's the widgets, because the sidebar appears right away. I suspect the culprit may be a piece of Javascript included in the template itself, because your main blog content is the part that takes so long to load. Maybe that Snapshots feature, or another piece of external code you've installed, is at fault. With any piece of Javascript you add to your blog, the script itself will most likely be hosted on an external server. If that server is running slow, it will take a while for the code to run - which could explain the delay. Hope this helps I also hope it makes sense, as I woke up way too early for a Sunday (7-ish), and still have a fuzzy head!
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  6. One thing that jumps out at me is the fact that you have redundant widgets. For example, you have at least three different live traffic feeds, from MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and FeedJIT. And the Last.fm widget is Flash, which means it takes a while to load, probably longer than a comparable JavaScript widget.

    Also, the plethora of small images in several of the widgets, even though the images are small, requires a separate HTTP request for each and every little thumbnail. I can see easily about between 50 and 100 requests for your homepage as it is, not including the inlined images in your posts. That's an awful lot; each request takes time, and since a lot of the images are coming from the same server, there's a limitation on how many of them can be downloaded simultaneously (there's a limit coded into Web browsers, somewhere on the order of two simultaneous requests per domain).

    All told, it took about 30 seconds to load completely. The first time, it was ten or 15 sec before the middle column even appeared.

    Hope these tips help you!
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  7. I love the new header.
    it does not take very long to load for me, maybe a few seconds. I have widgets as well and have never noticed any problems loading.

    Hope the headache is now gone Hugsssssssss.
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  8. Thank you all for your helpful comments. I have taken away several of the widgets and taken some of the javascripts out of the template. Most was stuff I had added a fair while ago and wasn't really bothered about anymore anyway.
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  9. It's still pretty slow. But I'll be back now I know what was wrong!
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  10. I like the new banner too...

    What's weird is the widgets often load but I have to wait for the content...and sometimes that's the only thing that doesn't show up! But I refresh and it's usually okay. I'm not sure what it is...you don't seem to have many more widgets than I do...I put the slower loading ones near the bottom tho.

    Oh Well...you're worth the wait!
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  11. Great new header and the blog loads so much faster. Nice work, keep on bloggin
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