Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook

How fast does your blog load? If it takes too long, you lose readers. Things like large badges, buttons, graphics, music, autoplay video, and other gadgets drain your load time. Here’s a website I found to test your blog’s loading speed: Pingdom Tools. It’s free to use. This is how they say it works:

The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.

The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars.

You can view the list of objects either in load order or as a hierarchy. The hierarchy view allows you to see which objects are linked to in for example a CSS file.

Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.

Note: This version doesn’t load objects included in JavaScripts. We have also put a limit on the number and size of the objects that are loaded (to prevent the tool from downloading movies, for example).

I see a lot of blogs everyday. Waaaay too many of them take up to 2 minutes to load! I know you love those buttons and twinkles and music, but to be honest– not many other people do. Of course, you should blog for yourself. After all, it’s your blog! But it also helps to be considerate to your visitors. If your blog takes longer than 30 seconds to load, that’s far too long. Consider removing the resouce-eating hogs on your blog.