Marco Luthe Online!

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:

As of May 2010, I no longer use WP-Polls with the new theme.

[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.