The Hurrierder I Go The Behinder I Get
Back about half a lifetime ago … well, to be a little more precise,… days ago …, I started out to fill in the tick mark boxes on the "must get done" list by starting a post here inspired by something i had just read on my blogging friend pat Doyle’s site … summarized here:
I posted about adding Triggit to my site recently.
Well, I have just removed it. My site seemed so slow since I installed it. I can’t say for sure that Triggit is the reason my site was slow, but it does seem to me that it’s faster now that I have removed it…
Now except in a general way from reading Pat’s comments I have absolutely no idea what Triggit really is. I’ve very disenchanted lately with many "solutions in search of a requirement" that are currently being churned out by dozens of aspiring Internet hopefuls. The way I thought I world craft this post is, I’d point out a couple ways Pat 9and the rest of us) could avoid guesswork and actually know when something was or wasn’t loading down our blogs (websites).
And that’s still what i am doing, but I spent most of the day here learning a lot more than I really wanted to about why my own sites are a slow as they are and why WordPress itself and certainly a great many WordPress themes are just not very well designed.
You can, and should use one or more products to check your site’s page loading times often. Sites slow down for a variety of reasons but a fact of Internet life is, they never speed up by themselves but they often slow down all on their own. No one else cares … except the visitors who give up in disgust and go elsewhere, so if it is to be it is up to me. Here’s three useful tools and some pointers on each. Sad to say, though, not one of them or all three of them together are going to tell you if you should or should not run Triggit … that’s a business decision I’ll leave up to you.
WebSiteOptimization.com:
This is a very useful and simple to use site. You simply ‘feed" the site the URL you want to measure and you get back a useful page of reports that show you everything that was loaded by the call to the page, the size of the files and a quick to evaluate "score card" that lets you know right away if your blog/website needs work and where you have to focus. The downside tat i see is that you don’t really get a feel for how long each element (in general, larger size = longer time, but not always) and you must do your research work into corrections elsewhere. Highly valuable for a quick test, though, and run by a reputable company who offers paid consultancy services to do the grunt work for you, if you prefer.
Yahoo! Yslow for Firebug:
This is a more technical tool, but still very easy to use for the enlightened among you who use FireFox. If you haven’t yet joined our FireFox community, move along, there’s nothing to see here. To use Yslow you first install a common FireFox extension or add-in known as Firebug a
nd the install Yslow itself. YSlow gives very detailed breakdowns of every single element of page loading … but it can also be closed down to just a simple meter that runs in your status bar and keeps track of page ‘weight" and load times continuously. Recommended for those who do their own tweaking/programming.
Pingdom Tools - Full page test:
Here’s the one I think most bloggers and entrepreneurs really want. Pingdom is a really interesting company whose core business is monitoring site and server uptime for a fee. Some of their plans look well worth it, by the way. But they off several handy free services as well and their full page test is a great one. Just go to the link, type in the URL you want to check and you will be blown away by how many different modules and programs are loading just to make your readers able to view your cat pictures (Hi Matt ;-)). You get precise sizes and times, but more importantly get a graphic image of what is loading when and what requests are "really" loading down your page … hint to users of services like MyBlogLog, BlogRush, etc., it isn’t always your own blog/server that’s slow. Pingdom also saves your last few tests automatically so you can take a quick snapshot, make a change on your blog (Hint … there are a lot of slow plug-ins out there) and decide right away how to handle the tradeoff between speed and user functionality. Great tool.
So there you have it. Three free and useful tools to help you know why your blog loads slow and what you can do about it … how much have you improved your load time this week? I lopped more than 3 seconds off mine by "losing" plug-ins and other services that "weighed" more than they were worth.
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Thanks, Dave! This is really helpful. I will try this out on my blogs.