Trimming The Fat: Improving Blog Performance
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One of the things that I’ve seen on a lot of blogs is that it’s entirely too easy for things to get so loaded down with unneeded or unused stuff that ends up serving only to make the blog load slower. Slower loading blogs are a lot less likely to get returning visitors or regular readers.
Anyone who’s visited this blog before will remember that Dilithium has been a pretty bad offender itself, sometimes taking as long as two or three minutes to load. Well, Today I’ve spent some time taking my own advice and have done some serious trimming.
The first thing I did was to change to a wider, three column Adsense-ready theme, ProSense-Blue by Dosh Dosh and The Wrong Advices. This theme is much faster loading than the old one and leaves plenty of room for whatever sidebar widgets and advertising that I care to put in. Because it’s Adsense-Ready, All I needed to do is put my Pub-… number in the appropriate spots, tweak one of the ad-blocks to suit my taste and it was mostly ready to go.
With this theme, I decided that instead of displaying a digg button for every post, I looked around and got the Digg This plugin that allows me to have digg buttons displayed ONLY when a post has actually been dugg.
The next bandwidth saving measure I took was to not include the code that I had in the old theme for Sitemeter or displaying that little Alexa widget that used to take forever to load. Also, because it took noticeable time to load and has never produced any traffic, the BlogRush widget (and it’s associated plugin) is gone as well. Another widget removed because it never generated any traffic is the BUMPzee widget and associate plugin. Taking these things out means that not only will the blog’s pages load faster, there will be less processing needed to produce them.
These changes have resulted in a massive improvement in the amount of time it takes for this blog to load. Checking with Firebug I found that the home page loaded in 13.1 seconds.
Another thing about this theme that I like is that really conspicuous RSS button in the header, which will more than likely lead to more RSS subscribers which will translate to more returning visitors over time.
Speaking of returning visitors, my wife pointed out to me that one of the ways that she finds a link back to a blog that she’s visited and left a comment on is by way of the “Subscribe to comments“, which allows readers to receive email notifications of new comments on entries that they’ve commented on.
Technorati Tags: prosense-blue, blogrush, digg this, alexa, slow loading, blogging tips, sitemeter, loading time, adsense ready, bumpzee
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This does load a whole lot faster. I love it. And I do think that subscribe to comments is a great way to bring people back to the blog.
Thanks. Yeah, subscribe to comments encourages discussions to start withing the comments.