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8.19.2010

Book Blogging 101 - Slow Blog Load


Spawned from the Big Sis, Little Blog program, Book Blogging 101 was born. Do you have a question? Leave it in the comments section or email me parajunkee at gmail dot com

Q. My Blog is slow to load? What is slowing it down?

I can't tell you exactly what is slowing your blog down, but I can give you an idea of what generally slows down a blog.

But first, let's go over why you want your page to load quickly... THE FICKLE READER. Boredom and impatience is rampant with the internet generation. Even an oldie like me, who can still remember the days of AOL, dial-up connections and *gasp* page load that took more than a minute, loses patience when a page takes a considerable amount of time to load.

Q. What is too long? 

General consensus. 4 seconds. Anything over that, and you are considered a slow load - and your bounce rate is going to be HIGH.

Q. Ok, stop. What is a bounce rate?


Google definition: Bounce rate (sometimes confused with exit rate) is a term used in web site traffic analysis. It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.


Q. That's great. Whatever. Now what is slowing it down?


  1. Listen. Do you hear that music playing on your blog... alarm bells going off immediately. Any kind of streaming sound will SLLLOOOOWWW page load down considerably.
  2. Do you have adsense on your blog? That tends to slow down the load a tad.
  3. Amazon widgets? That'll do it too.
  4. Those countdown thinga-ma-jigs? MAJOR SLOW DOWNS
  5. Ton of sparkling, moving, rotating and happy things? The over usage of javascript will most definitely slow down your blog
  6. Overloaded with images? Do you have images up and down your sidebars?
  7. Your blog template might be the culprit. If it is also overloaded with images, or HUGE CSS files, it could put a big damper on your load time.
  8. The amount of posts you display. You might want to limit your posts to 2 or 3.









13 comments:

Anonymous said...

THANK YOU for telling me what bounce rate is. I had a feeling that's what it was but it was bugging me I didn't know exactly.


Stephanie G
Paranormal Haven

Unknown said...

Thank you, that's very helpful! I was already trying to keep my widgets and graphics, etc, at a very low amount, but it's nice to hear it confirmed! I'm always frustrated when there's a blog I really want to read, but it takes forever for the page to laod.

ParaJunkee said...

If you put it in perspective. Each one of your widgets / gadgets have to load on the page. One after another like dominoes.

Let's say .25 seconds for each widget.

If you have 50 gadgets it takes 12.5 seconds to load your gadgets. This does not include the blog template, which might take 2 seconds to load. So that is a total of 15 second page load - which is a lot slower than the normal reader will wait to see your blog.

More gadgets = slow.

Tales of Whimsy said...

I've wondered about this. But my question is, how do I find out if mine is loading slow?

Twimom227 said...

WOW - awesome information. Thank you so much for explaining bounce rates and slow blogs.

Your Blogging 101 series is fantastic, Thanks!

Unknown said...

Thanks it is always great to know more about the tech part of our blogs. i for one am kind of blind when it comes to this.

Anonymous said...

Loving the Book Blogging 101 series, keep them coming! :)

Missie, The Unread Reader said...

I'm guilty of bouncing if the blog takes too long to load.

I've tested my site on different computers to make sure that is not the case with my blog, but you are right, the more flashy things you have on your site, the longer it takes to load. I love the blog buttons I have collected, and I don't want to give them up, but they do cause my blog to take a bit longer to load.

I love BB 101. I wish everyone would read it!

April (BooksandWine) said...

You can test your load time on this site: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Mine was 2.5 seconds, yay! But, I have like 3 widgets and that is it.

Candace said...

I generally skip the widgets because of it slowing things down. Mine was slow after I got a new template and I took ALL the extra stuff off. STILL slow. It was the fancy print above the posts and on the sidebar! Brought it back to basic print and it was fine. Now it seems to load quickly. I can say that there are some blogs I don't visit often because it loads too slow. It's very important that your blog loads quickly!

Tina said...

This is really valuable info. I never knew what a bounce rate is, so you've shown me the light. ;)

Will now go on and read all other "Book Blogging 101" posts...

Happy reading!
●▬▬▬๑۩Tina @ Book Couture۩๑▬▬▬▬●

Tanya said...

Thank you for addressing this issue!! I am 110% guilty of having an obsession with flashy things! Am I fae? LOL! I love pictures because I'm such a visual person, but apparently I need to keep it down and be selective. :( Do you think it makes a difference with bounce rate when setting up your account to show the "Adult Content Warning" before entering a blog as well?

Great post!!!

redhead said...

Great article! Maybe it's just because I'm a little older, but the cleaner a blog is, the more likely I am to stick around. by cleaner, I mean it's easy to find posts (few ads), easy to find some kind of tag cloud, some kind of recent posts or category lists. Beyond load time, I don't want visual overload when I visit a site, blog or anything else.

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