The Fox Hole

Speeding Up My Blog

I have noticed that my blogs, especially this one, seem to load slower lately. Even if it doesn't "load slower", it'll seem to be "stuck" at loading something and it'll never finish, hence my blog doesn't get "fully loaded".

Now, don't tell me to switch to Wordpress, because that is definitely NOT the solution. Even if I go the self-hosted way with Wordpress (like I am doing with Blogger. It's self-hosted), it won't solve the problem of slow-loading.

I know many bloggers out there have similar problems too - their blogs load up slow. Many have fallen for the "switch to Wordpress" myth. It still doesn't solve their slow-loading problem. With Wordpress, you now have yet another piece to add to the puzzle - the MySQL Database. Data needs to be called from yet-another-server to display on the blog.

No, I am not saying Wordpress sucks. I'm saying that changing to Wordpress (or any other blogging platform) doesn't solve the slow-loading problem.

The problem of slow-loading happens is due to the numerous off-site widgets we place on the blogs. The Pay-Per-Post badge, the MyBloglog widget, the Entrecard, etc. Every single one of these widgets makes an off-site call to their respective home servers before they will load and show up on your blog. MyBloglog and Blogcatalog widgets are worse because the more "rows" you want to show (to show how many people visit your site), the SLOWER your load time will be, because each picture on the widget, regardless of whether it's tiny or large size, is a separate call to their home servers. Yes, each picture is 1 "transaction".

Remember the Advertlets fiasco in January? And the recent Nuffnang incident in March? Yes, ads are off-site "widgets" too. They need to refer back to their host servers to retrieve data to display on your blog, and in the meantime, your blog is "on hold" till their widgets display. Up till now I still haven't re-installed Advertlets.

I actually observed how my site loaded, and it appears to be "stuck" more often than not, at 2 particular places - loading the widget from Technorati, and loading the widget from Postreach.com.

I've decided to remove the ClickComments thing from Postreach.com, and immediately I could see a significant improvement of my load times. If my blog slows down again I'll take a look at possibly removing the Technorati widget too.

Labels: blog