ClearYourMind is our company blog about business, the Internet and everything a "web-guy" loves by Javier Cabrera, owner and principal of Emastudios, a tiny web design agency based in the beautiful caribbean-like Buenos Aires, Argentina.

May 30, 2008

Slow Blog? Improve Your Blog Speed!


This kid blogs really fast!

If your blog is running slow then you may be suffering from the Guy Kawasaki Syndrome. It’s pretty common for us to start throwing things we don’t really need to our blog sidebar like advertising, search engines that load from another source, our vacations photos via the flickr flash badge and any sort of crappy code you can copy and paste to include widgets in your blog.

Bad news is, it’s a blog, not a billboard. People will come in to your blog to actually read it, not to see that bike trip you did last weekend or to see some Dell computers advertising making your blog jumpy when they scroll down. Here is a list of things you can get rid off to improve the performance for your readers:

SHARE IT.
This is a big no-no and even I got cough in the evil hands of Share it. The promise of having your blog post in every single news sharing web site like Yahoo, Delicious, Facebook and even LinkedIn which has anything to do with it may be too tempting to resist. This kind of services usually throws a javascript for you to copy and paste inside your blog post, pretty simple uh? just one line of code and all those nice icons will open when the reader click on the link or just move the pointer over it.

The problem is, once you place that on your page and you have more than 4 posts, the page becomes really slow to browse and scroll because it’s pulling content from another source. And not just one time, but several times, one time for each pot you have in your front page.

Solution: use it only on the article page, not in your main blog page. When people goes to your blog they should see it right away! If I have to use one of those SHARE IT links, when you come to CYM (http://www.emastudios.com/cym/) you won’t see any SHARE IT link. But, if you click in one of our articles, (let’s say http://www.emastudios.com/cym/2008/05/project-management-web-application/), you will get to that article page and I would actually throw there the SHARE IT link, that way you don’t load 10 or 20 SHARE IT links and you just load one where it is really needed, at the end of your article.

ADVERTISING.
This is a real pain some times. You want to read a blog and you have to scroll twice to get to the real content; the first half of the screen is cluttered with ads.

Solution: use ads only if your blog is getting real valuable visits. If you are getting $5 bucks for your 40 ads in your main blog page; then it’s time to move those ads away for good and start worrying about the content. And, if in the future you need to choose, avoid Flash ads (worst are those ones with movies inside! what the heck!) and choose the good Google ads which, are between the top ones.

DAMN FLOATING BALLOONS WITH A PAGE INSIDE.
The people that use this one should burn in hell. Really. No matter who. There should be a law against those ones. I’m talking about those text links that have a double bottom line and when you, reader, move your mouse pointer over it, a comic-like balloon appears (some times with a javascript effect which makes it a double crime) in the middle of the page, with shadow, and starts it’s evil dance of loading some web page where the word you just touch with your mouse pointer appears written.

Solution: no matter how many “hits” they can give you, they are the root of all evil. Every time someone installs one of those scripts, a devil gets his horns. If you really need to use them, you could use them in your article page instead of your main blog page, to speed up your main blog page but I hardly believe there is a really good reason to keep that anywhere in your blog. I won’t recommend those balloon links scripts.

RATING STARS.
Those little five stars that give everyone the opportunity to vote for your blog post could also produce a slow blog. They usually comes with a small info link for you to click and then, a balloon pop ups from there sometimes moving your scroll up or down, depending on where you browser scroll was at the moment of voting just to display a “thanks!” or to show you the top five blog posts from that blogger.

Solution. Implement a “Best posts ever” on your sidebar and place your best posts there. How to know which ones are? Well, usually the more visited and there are a bunch of plugins out there to display the top five more visited posts (like this one if you have wordpress). You can also place a “Most Commented” list of posts on your sidebar (here is one, simple and powerful). There are lots of things you could do to avoid having those little stars, but if you still need a rating system, I would recommend to place it on your article page instead of your blog main page.

There are more

Of course there are more widgets and plugins that can whisper in your ear and make you end up with a really slow blog; so this is my general rule of thumb. PLACE ANY OF THOSE IN THE ARTICLE PAGE and not in your main blog page, so when your readers come to your blog they don’t wait for all those little ads, widgets and balloon like links to load from 10 different sources before they can start reading at your news.

Yes, we have my Twitter account to display what we are doing on the right of this blog and sometimes loads a while before showing up the real page content. We will be taking that off and opening a Twitter account just for EmaStudios tonight, and guess where it will go? you got it. On the article page.

Follow us on Twitter for more productivity, business and Internet posts at the "DonCabrera" tweet!

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