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Thank you for visiting Addoit Blog.
This blog is dedicated to publishing article & review on News, Careers, Motivations, Economics & Etc .Interested parties are welcomed to reproduce or quote materials published here. You also can share any article with me. Comments and feedbacks are welcomed.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

How long does your site take to load?

We Malaysians are a frustrated lot. We are at the mercies of the internet service providers like Streamyx, Jaring and the other smaller players. We know our internet connection sucks max.
I have just tried for the 100th time to stumble someone’s post and it just won’t move. It is darn frustrating to surf at night because the internet speed over at my place is too slow.
So, as a gentle reminder to those bloggers who have fancy schmancy theme or template, plenty of plugins pulling in all sorts of ‘popular post, most view post, top ten commented yadda yadda yadda’ frills and lots of photos plus tracking codes, do keep your blog simpler.
If your traffic is meant to attract Malaysians, all the more you should trim it because many people dislike waiting for a page to completely download. Sometimes, we may not notice how slow our site is because of the cookies and cache stored in our PC. However, those who come by has to wait for a long time to see all the photos and etc.
The other thing you may want to observe is - Are your contents loaded first or do people have to wait for the sidebars and top banner to complete first?
I noticed that many food bloggers have these problems whereby their contents hang while we wait for the sidebars with lots of linked in pictures to download first. My food blogs too have the same problems but I am reluctant to rectify the matter.
If you really want to reduce your loading time, there are several things you can do (my reasons for not doing them in brackets).
1) Reduce the number of posts on the main page (but I like at least 5 posts on the main page)
2) Reduce the size of your photos (but I like 500pixel width photos for the oomph)
3) Cut off your posts and add ‘read more’ (but my readers hate to click ‘read more’ so I never use that)
4) Keep your sidebar contents to the minimum, trim them often (I am keeping the minimum but who can do without money making ads, right?)
5) Do not use tracking codes which you don’t rely on (I only keep Google analytics and a couple of other codes that make money for me)
If you want to know how long it takes for your site to load, just google for it. There are several sites which tell you how long your site takes to load.
Remember : Sometimes, eye candy theme serves no purposes but instead, turn off potential visitors. Less is more!

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