I understand that the majority of bloggers have high speed Internet of some kind. I do too, but I also access the Internet using dial up daily as well (I am on dial up as I am writing this article in fact). If you access the Internet using dial up for a change, you will notice that a lot of the popular and major sites load up extremely quick. Google, Amazon, and eBay are to name a few. Professional and successful bloggers make a conscious effort to reduce their page load times. It is extremely important that people can access and completely load your site quickly. If your site loads fast on dial up, then think about how fast it loads up in high speed.
Minimize Your Page Load Time
- Reduce your graphics down to a smaller KB size
- Reduce the amount of links you have on your home page
- Reduce the amount of content on your home page
- Use the more tag in your posts after the first paragraph in your posts
- Don’t publish full size images in your post. Display thumbnail versions that link to the full size image
- Be conscious of various 3rd party plugins that are slow to load or cause the load time to hang
There are still people out there that can’t enjoy high speed Internet. I never want to leave that viewing audience out. Once a dial up users finds a fast loading site, they tend to bookmark/save to favorites more frequently than someone on high speed. Dial up users tend to value sites that load fast more than high speed Internet users. If you exclude dial up users in your considerations on designing your site, you are missing out on an array of dedicated and committed daily viewers that could potentially be visiting your site on a regular basis and contributing to your articles and posts. I also believe that Google keeps an eye on this as well. Reducing your load time and keeping your external links to a maximum of 100 per page will also help improve your Google SEO.
I will be adding some references later this evening to various sites where you can test your page load time and site optimization. If you have anything you want to add to this article, please feel free to add your comment below.
- Garry
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A couple of utilities I’ve found useful for shrinking pages and assets are:
* pngcrush (http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/) – A command line tool for shrinking PNG files. You can get some really good results with it, so that saves loading times.
* CSS Compressor (http://www.cssdrive.com/index.php/main/csscompressor/) – Shrinks CSS files. They can get pretty big after a while, so a small bit of optimisation is always good.
Also remember that making a request for a file takes time (even for high speed connections), so minimise the number of images, style sheets and javascript files on your pages. Use single images for CSS rollovers, combine javascript source and strip out everything you can. With the extremely short time it takes a visitor to decide on staying at your site, every byte can make a difference.
I don’t miss dial-up one bit
I used to use a lot of plugins that loaded large Javascript files that added to the large file sizes. Since then I have been consciously trying to get page load times down. Good tips Garry!
My blog load rather slow due to my sidebars graphic+ads
will do something on this some time later.
Dial up does stink… but because we all know that, the question is: “What can we do as bloggers to help dial up users enjoy their Internet experience as much as possible?”
Phil, thank you so much for providing those references. I am sure a lot of people will enjoy reading those links.
Ryan, Yes… man I was the way, I wanted every single wordpress plugin you could dig up!
The home (start) page of your site is so very important. You can only make one first impression. And waiting for things is horrible. You have to wait to get a burger at McDonalds, wait to see the doctor, wait and sleep in a parking lot for two days to get an xBox 360/PS3/Wii (in the past), wait to ride a roller coaster, etc… the last thing people want to do when they get home from waiting for things all day is to wait for pages to load.
Thanks for the comments guys, I love to read them and respond. Ryan, I am glad to see you here! It is great to talk with you again.
- Garry
Eches, one thing that you might want to consider doing is removing the additional Subscribe To MyGoogle, MyYahoo, My AOL, etc… because when a user clicks the first graphic which displays your reader count, they will be presented with all those options on their page. Why duplicate it on your site?
Also on your PPC and affiliate programs. Choose one program and run with it for a month testing it out. Next month try a different program, etc.. After you test a few out run some reports and see which program is more effective for your site.
I would totally free up some space on your home page. What might help with determining which advertisements to keep on your site, ask yourself this question: “Which of these paid advertisements or affiliate product links would I keep displayed on my site if I knew that I wouldn’t get paid?” Would you keep any? Would you keep one? Two? All, None?
Eches, don’t get me wrong… your site is great! I am just making a few suggestions on things you could do to shave down your page load times.
In one of my blog posts on the same subject I posted a link to a proxy you can use that slow you down to dial up speed. Firefox has some nice plugins that lets you switch proxys easy.
David,
That is a great tool for people that are conscious about their page load time. And it sure beats purposely using dial up to check things out.
I try to be very careful with my page load time. And very careful with the external links from my pages. That is one of the things that I liked about your site. It is very clean, for the most part, advertisement free… and everything on your page loads quick.
I have hurt my back again and have extreme lower back pain… so actually I am on dial up a lot now because I am in bed. My wireless router has broke and I am not about to stretch Cat5 cables throughout my house. When I get feeling better I will pick up another router at the store. I guess I can buy online online, but dial up isn’t too bad when you are simply creating publications and commenting on others.
(Who am I kidding! lol!!!)
Thanks for the comment and thanks for stopping by!
Garry