Please consider signing the Google Gmail Automatic BCC Option Petition
and spread the word. Thanks!

I need more signatures - at least, help me reach the 100 for starters! :-)
[click box to close]

Jan

30th

2008

Trying To Speed Up The Loading Process

I just recently tried the Web Page Analyzer service on websiteoptimization.com to see how long it takes to load my blog - and I was suprised by a) the loading time and b) the size of the loaded objects!

Then I looked through the report and found two interesting parts:

The Prototype JS library was being loaded in two different versions. One was initiated by the WordPress plugin “Live Search Popup” by Stefan Schimanski (that I definitely love - see this post). Unfortunately, loading both versions of Prototype ended up in approx. (50 + 90 =) 140 kB! As I do not know how to change the code so that only ONE version is being loaded, I decided to say “Farewell!” to the “Live Search Popup” plugin for now - maybe someone comes up with a solution. @Stefan: I liked your search field graphics so much that I kept it - I hope you are OK with that (as it comes along with the free plugin, anyway).
You should never show Flickr picture previews using the large photos (that are normally shown when you visit a Flickr photostream) and changing the width and height to fit a smaller size - still, the big one is being loaded. I changed a Flickr picture in one post from the “normal” one to a thumbnail one (240 x 160 via “all sizes”) - and that saved about 70 kB!
It seems like I have to get rid of commented-out code fragments and blanks in the source code of the template to speed up the loading even more.

[Update from 2008-01-31]
I have added a poll to the sidebar to see how my visitors rate the loading speed of my blog.

[Update from 2008-02-04]
I just changed the number of posts shown on one page from 10 to 5 - hope that helps speeding up.

[Update from 2008-08-18]
I decided to put the poll here:

Poll

How would you rate the loading speed of this blog?

good
(52%, 14 votes)

average
(7%, 2 votes)

only just sufficient
(15%, 4 votes)

unbearable
(26%, 7 votes)

Total voters: 27

Loading ...

[Update from 2008-09-18]
After compressing some files and using the “more”-tag more often now, I finally got back to 10 posts on the main page, which I think is all right.

The post ends here. Wanna leave a response? Have Your Say!

Next post: Which Heart Rate Monitor To Buy?
Previous post: Looking For A Song You Heard On TV?

Some post info

The above post was initially scribbled on January 30th, 2008 @ 20:29:56 +0100 (CET) and has been last modified on September 18th, 2008. It is filed under the category WordPress Stuff and has been tagged with the terms [plug | webdesign | wordpress].