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:
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
[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!
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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].
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