A new study analyzing the so-called ‘blog’ format was recently published on Royal Pingdom. Among other things, the study found that many popular blogs exceeded 500kb in page weight.
Long pages with copious amounts of images, links and script files have become synonymous with the blog-style page design and has been replicated across the blogoshere. However, the study concludes that this format may actually prove to be a disservice for blogs.
Optimization experts have long suggested that shorter load times and faster pages make sites more competitive. This belief has largely been discounted by blogs, which typically try and cram as much on the page as possible in order to provide the reader with relevant or interesting content.
The study suggests that disregarding optimization techniques, even for broadband users, actually does a disservice for blogs and leads to frustrated users. This should come as no surprise to any web-savvy individual, but has largely been ignored.
You can measure how well your site or blog performs via the Page Test tool, which was written by Pat Meenan. Check out the results for my blog, here. I scored an impressive 0.2secods to first byte, but a lousy 2.2 seconds until start render. Read the entire study here. How fast are your pages?
