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!

Post Author: lilian

12 thoughts on “How long does your site take to load?

    ahmike

    (October 28, 2008 - 12:12 am)

    lilian this is great man =) I am trying to take out what that slows down my blog. thanks again.

    Norhafidz

    (October 28, 2008 - 11:58 am)

    lilian, you point out a good point about TMNUT and JARING. They are sucks to the max.

    I’m just using less images theme right now to make my blog load faster.

    reddebt

    (October 28, 2008 - 5:16 pm)

    ehm, i guess. nothing we can do with that. I also have same problem sometimes. :(

    CypherHackz

    (October 28, 2008 - 5:22 pm)

    So far, my websites load fast. Only forum takes time to load maybe because of there are many scripts run behind.

    videos

    (October 29, 2008 - 10:04 pm)

    Beautiful blog, I will try to read all post, see you

    ahmike

    (October 30, 2008 - 12:03 am)

    Lol , I have just changed my theme, super fast now. No la at least better

    Paul

    (October 30, 2008 - 4:31 am)

    Well, I have many sites and they have various loading times, but I don’t really having problems with any of them.

    Chris Altesino

    (October 30, 2008 - 10:55 am)

    Good point! Thankfully I generally keep my websites to simple wordpress blogs. In addition most of my sites target Americans.

    appleblogger

    (November 1, 2008 - 12:44 pm)

    ehm..its depend on our computer speed, tmnut, datacenter, streamyx and others. Ehm, i don’t know which one to blame. So, i just blame myself because cannot run some company better than tmnut and jaring. Waa..

    savings

    (November 4, 2008 - 7:19 am)

    You have touched on a very good point here. Not most bloggers are aware of the problems in other countries. I always think about my loading time and reduce images where possible.

    Thanks

    CPla

    (November 4, 2008 - 1:26 pm)

    Interesting points you raised. I am in Bangkok and I host my site in the States because Thailand’s International connection bandwidth is insufficient. So local download speeds can be 1789k, when at the same time international sites only do 200 – 400k (when accessed from here), on a 1024k premium package.
    So, with an eye on international traffic, site is on a US server.
    What sort of speeds do you get in Malaysia? I always use the same test site, speedtest.net, because I can choose the server to test. Some sites just give nice big numbers that are unrealistic.

    Donovan Kelley

    (November 5, 2008 - 12:38 am)

    I have been in the web hosting business for 5 years now and would always recommend hosting your site in a location that is geographically close to your target audience. Speed is important and the physical limitations of hosting in a distant land cause increased latency and therefore slower loading times.

Comments are closed.