Is Your Site Too Slow?
Day 13 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide
After you have created your website and written a couple of posts, it is time to start improving the site’s design. One of the first things that you should focus on when you are improving your website is how long it takes to load. A slow webpage can annoy your visitors, and it can also be a sign that your server won’t be able to handle a surge in hits.
The first thing that you can do to speed up your website is to make sure that you are running the wordpress plugin WP-Cache. Wp-Cache is an extremely efficient system of storing your posts on wordpress so that they don’t have to be reloaded from the server each time someone visits. In some cases, it can speed your site up by an order of magnitude or more.
So say that you’ve installed wp-cache, but your site is still loading slowly, how can you figure out what is holding it back? Well this is actually extremely simple, if you are running Firefox. Firefox has an extension called firebug which is extremely useful for a webpage designer, one of the functions, the one we care about today, shows you how long it takes to load each element of a webpage.
Looking at SavvyAffiliate.com using Firebug
I had 255 Kb which loaded in 1.89 seconds. (I’m using a cable service for my ISP) If I decided that my site was too slow, I could look and see what was holding it up. Answer, several largish Image files from the post break out blogging. I won’t be too worried about those since they will naturally be pushed off my blog front page with another couple of posts. I don’t see anything too troubling on SavvyAffiliate, but I wouldn’t as I have already gone through and fixed some trouble spots.
Now lets look at a site whihc I suspect hasn’t tried to optimize for speed. StepenFung.net, who I choose at random from my list of reviewme peers.
This site is in trouble in terms of loading speed. It takes an incredible 1 and 1/2 minutes to load! It makes me feel like I’m back in 1998 dialing up AOL on my 28K modem. Some of the slow loading could be due to a slow server, another large part of it is due to a huge page. His site is at least 1.6 MB. He should strive to cut that down, but what should he cut?
Luckily firebug shows the file size of each object. Although not all the objects are on the screen (after all there were 120 of them) one which sticks out is the Func_033.js, some javascript programming running intellitxt. It is 29 KB and took a 1.2 seconds to load, almost as much time as my entire site took to load. He also appears to be running a lot of images and services off of other pages. This can slow down your site dramatically as you have to contact numerous servers to load the webpage.
But you don’t really fcare too much about stephen fung (Unless you are him, in which case, How bout a reciprocal link?), and neither do I.
on November 21st, 2009 at 9:54 am
Thanks for the info. I’d love to use Firebug but ever since the 3.5.x versions it seems unstable and volatile. Hopefully someone comes out with an equivalent for Safari soon!
on November 27th, 2009 at 8:59 am
On Firefox get an addon called Downloadhelper then goto a streaming music website such as Jango / Deezer, somthing profesional and when the music starts playing you will notice 3 colourd balls in the top tool bar of firefox spinning round click them and download the file.
on May 21st, 2010 at 9:38 am
I have tried Firebug and honestly I am not very impressed with it.
on July 8th, 2010 at 7:47 am
Hi
This is very info, i think im very interest to try this Firebug i like to use this.
Thanks
on July 22nd, 2010 at 9:32 am
No, I think it is very fast, but so far I’ve read from you and other people’s sites up to speed with the site is very important for SEO. This speed is very important for Google.
on July 27th, 2010 at 12:49 am
speed for other viewers is extremely important thanks for sharing this useful guide
on November 24th, 2010 at 1:36 am
Well, just did some tests and my site is up to speed so things are looking good for me!
Till then,
Jean
on February 3rd, 2011 at 10:56 am
That’s what I like about Google, they’re like an IT department who aren’t annoyed by your requirements, and they probably thought about them before you did.
on June 2nd, 2011 at 12:00 am
By the way, I found an awesome site that is even recommended by Google, just do a quick search for webpage test and you will that site on the number 1 listing. It simulates the load times with people’s internet connection speed.
-Jean
on July 25th, 2011 at 2:18 am
I think i haven’t faced problem like this in my site, but this is a good thing to know from this post and its really not good thing for any website to have a low speed while loading time.
on July 27th, 2011 at 2:15 am
Take of photos from the website and its going faster direct.
on October 2nd, 2011 at 11:42 pm
I use plugins to make it load faster!!
on November 11th, 2011 at 12:51 am
Plugins are better… to help your page load much faster.
on January 10th, 2012 at 8:17 pm
Not really work for me.