2008-08-01

Blogging Tip : Optimizing Page Load Time

While dropping my card on other sites, I had a chance to read their content, eyeing their cool display stuff, amazing photos and lots more. By doing so has improved my English as I'm able to pick up most frequently used words and new words. But one thing that caught my attention is the page load time. It's vital to know that fast loading pages improve the user experience. No doubt about it! This chart below shows the number of cards that were dropped on my blog each day.

(source: Entrecard)

(source: My Stats)

Like myself, I've started using AJAX techniques to reduce latency. This significantly decreases the amount of time between a user click and the browser finishing rendering the new content, thus ,you can read my entire blog without reloading the page ever.

I found few things to be interesting:-
a- Seeing so many sites having too many posts on the homepage.
b- Lots of big size photos.
c- Too many scripts/widgets from the third party hosted on their external server.

Below are few basic tips to reduce your page load time. These tips do not require any control over your web server, like being able to edit .htaccess or even the Apache server config.

a- Limit the number of post on homepage. If you want to display more posts, create expandable blog posts with links or add the more quicktag button.



b- Fat graphics are the leading cause of slow Web pages. Saving your images as PNG! PNG can often be compressed to 50% of it's original size without quality loss if you use the right software.

c- Before giving the browser any external object references (img src="http://www.blogger.com/..."), (link rel="stylesheet" href="...">), (script src="..."), etc, record the current time. After the page load is done, subtract the time you began, and include that time in the URL of an image you reference off of your server. Worst case scenario if the external server may not be reliable.

d- Last but not least, check your site performance or else you may also compare your site's performance. Visit Webslug to find out how quick your site is.


4 comments:

Felicity said...

pls vote for my dream job video here :) http://urlbrief.com/644385 ... Im wearing gray top and i have long straight hair...
thanks

Is said...

My recent comments box is now becoming an announcement board, thanks Felicity but next time, could you use the br tag? It will flank your long data url and visible for all the readers i.e not just hidden away for screen reader users. In the spirit of blogosphere, please consider voting for her dream job at
http://www.futureresume.com/dream_job.aspx?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=media&utm_content=Ctest&utm_campaign=Inc

HawgWyld said...

Wow! Very useful. I used the speed test site you posted and saw that my site crawled in at a miserable 14 seconds.

Got to cut down on that...

Thanks for the info!

The Natural State Hawg

Is said...

@TNSH I really enjoy reading your articles :)

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