Blog Bloat

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?

Published
by
gregory
on November 7, 2008
in Blog Optimization
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Viewing 1 Comment

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    For what it's worth, you could significantly improve your performance pretty easily without changing anything about the site itself:

    1 - enable gzip for your non-php requests (base page, jquery, swfobject.js). It will cut them down significantly and shave at least 1/2 a second off of your start render time (and save you some bandwidth charges if you pay by the byte). Since you're running on an Apache host it should be as simple as enabling mod_deflate.

    2 - Collapse all of those js files that come before start render into a single one (or at least just one more in addition to jquery). You can even do it without modifying the js files themselves if you install mod_concat - you just need to change how you reference them. This will shave at LEAST another 1/2 second off. (for bonus you can also combine the css files using the same technique).

    From there you could get into image spriting some of the png's if you wanted but the gzip and combining will get you the bulk of the improvements for VERY little work and won't change anything about the blog presentation or architecture.
 

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