How fast is my blog downloading for my readers?
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Don’t worry about the audio. If the file takes long to load, a visitor will get some buffering time after clicking the play button. The audio player itself doesn’t tax the browser.
It doesn’t? You sure? So that means I dont need to remove it?
That would be AWESOME. You sure?
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Positive. (Didn’t need to, but I even checked your blog with a slow computer: audio player loads looong before the videos finish loading.) Delays are mainly due to heavy objects and objects linked to from other sites. As I already explained, in the case of your audio neither of those applies to the player: they apply to the mp3, and the mp3 is called when you click the play button, not when you visit the blog page. (Besides, the mp3 is very small: just 192KB.)
You’ve got seventeen posts on each page, most of them with images or videos. Forget about the poor innocent audio and listen to what three experienced bloggers already suggested: reduce the number of posts per page to only a few, and/or use the more tag before the images/videos. That’s good for another reason too: excessive scrolling isn’t visitor-friendly.
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3) is there a program or website anyone knows of that will simulate dial-up download speeds?
I do know of a program that will do this but membership is required to use it .
Google recommends Page Speed
Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them. http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/Here are other tools minus links:
Online page loading time checkers and other tools1. NetMechanic
2. Page Speed
3. Pingdom Tools
4. Site-Perf.com
5. Webmaster Tools
6. Web Page Analyzer
7. WebPagetest
8. WeeTools
9. YSlow -
Once you do, you’ll find what I did: that your sidebar goes on for miles with nothing beside it. You will then have some decisions to make about reducing your sidebar contents or switching to a new theme with more sidebars.
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You have been given good advice about hoe to reduce page loading time:
1. Reduce the number of posts on your front page.
2. Use “the more tag”.
3. Reduce the size of images, the number of media embeds
Images, flash and sometimes even sound files can draw visitors but do you really need all that you have now? If you don’t need sharp resolution, choose GIFs over JPEGs, as GIFs load more quickly. JPGs are generally best for photos, GIFs for anything else. Optimize and decrease the size of your images or use thumbnails that link to the full-size image. Reduce the number of widgets, embeds.
4. You can use CSS to improve your web sites load time. With your styles in an external .css file, the browser can cache all the formatting and stylizing for your pages instead of having to read each and every single tag all over again. This reduces lengthy tags and replaces them with smaller class styles instead. Combine your background images into a single image and use the CSS background-image and background-position properties to display the desired image segment. If you add any custom CSS to your blog, make sure it validates.IMHO there are many bloggers out there who don’t have a clue about how many folks are on dial-up service. Most rural dwellers in North America do not have broadband access. Yet, I frequently find that North American bloggers, who live in big cities, assume everyone does have broadband access.
When that lack of awareness is combined with a penchant for adding decorative but useless widgets, badges and other “tat” that does nothing for readers, but provides a backlink to a site from whence the “tat” came, I scratch my head and try to think of a tactful way to tell the blogger in question to “house clean” their blog.
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Thanks everyone, I have a much better understanding of how it works now.
And like I said before, I will reduce the number of posts on the front page (its only the front page that has so many posts, not every page), optimize images, and put videos “after the jump” where ever i can.
I am glad to know that the audio player only loads the Mp3 when you click play, not when the page loads…which means it doesnt take long to load…thats what I was trying to clarify.
And I thank you all for your help and suggestions, I am conscious of the fact that many people are still on Dial-up, just trying to learn what happens when they visit my page so I can decide what changes I need to make so I can optimize the blog for them as much as possible (or as much as I can bear to part with)
Thanks again for all your help! :D
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Placing images as thumbnails is good for dealing with bandwidth speed. I’ve seen people post very large images in each post with a month’s archives on the main page!
99% of the images I had on my sidebar, I placed them all in separate pages which are now tabbed at the top of my blog. I hated how all the images looked warped on Internet Explorer. The spacing was off and just looked weird. But everything looks off on Internet Explorer. If you have too much on your sidebar, maybe place them in pages.
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I think you’ve been given all the advise there is, so I won’t repeat it. I just wanted to thank you for even caring. Lots of bloggers don’t which is why I had to put a stop to a wonderful blogger friendship when I was still on dial-up – her blog had so many high-res images and her sidebar was full of animated gifs that not only it took ages to load (and no, it’s no fun to read around blank spots where images are still loading) but also regularly crashed my old laptop.
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/nod to taletellerin, I agree. Too few people think about things like download speed and people on slower connections.
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