How’s Your Load Time?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, October 24, 2008

One thing that often goes unnoticed or ignored by new webmasters is load time. New bloggers like to go a little crazy and every widget they set their eyes on to their new blog. It looks cool. There’s no doubt. I don’t dispute that the widgets, gadget, and bells and whistles are cool. But they could slow down your website’s load time and that’s not cool.

Why does load time matter? It matters because your PageRank, and maybe even your rank in the search engines, could be affected by it. The faster your load time, the less you’ll aggravate your site visitors. If visitors find your site cumbersome then they won’t come back. Search engines want their search results to benefit searchers. The want the best results possible as that will encourage more searchers to use them instead of the competition. So it is in their best interests to return sites for each search query that provide the end user with the best experience. Slow load times impede that. Therefore, the search engines prefer sites with faster load times.

I’m not saying you should get rid of all of your widgets. I am saying that you might want to take some time to figure out which ones are the absolutely most necessary. And keep those. Find reasonable alternatives for the others. As your load time increases you’ll find that your website’s quality will increase and so should your traffic.

Read similar posts in Content Development

1 Comment

Comment by zuborg

Made Wednesday, 12 of November , 2008 at 2:34 pm

You are right.
Just to complete your post - to measure loading speed of some page I would recommend to use this online free tool - http://Site-Perf.com/

It measure loading speed of page and it’s requisites (images/js/css) like browsers do and shows nice detailed chart - so you can easily spot bottlenecks. It’s very detailed and accurate, supports a lot of features like Keep-Alive and HTTP-compression.

Also useful feature is that this tool can measure quality of internet link of your server.