Google have publicly declared that in 2010, page load time will be added as one of 200+ measurements that calculates Google search engine results page (SERP) ranking. So, page load time is now a calculative measurement in your search engine optimization (SEO) quest. Are you looking for higher traffic from Google and spending a lot of time building backliks? If you still never check your page load time or take any action to reduce load time, it is time to do so. Here is the list of widgets that I have deleted or disabled from Atniz.com
- Twittercounter
- Twitter widget showing latest tweets
- Tweetmeme button on each blog post
- Alexa ranking
- Socialspark and Izearanks codes
- Gravatar
Any third party programs need to wait for the server to reply and it affect our load time. Having more widgets definitely looks nice but visitors need to wait to get it loaded. I have removed Twitter related plugins and slow widgets as this are the most dragging icons. I noticed removing Alexa widget saves 1s in load time. Disabling gravatar in comment section saves another 2-3 seconds as some of the blog post contains more than 30 comments. Loading each gravatar image for all 30 comments takes a lot of time. Recently, I have reduced the number of images used on the blog and always keep the sizes smaller using wordpress image editor. Here is another set of wordpress plugins that will help you to reduce load time.
- Gzip
This plugin is not available in wordpress above 2.6 versions. It helps to drop some load time
- WP-Cache
This plugin also helps to reduce load time but not that significant
- WP-Minify
This is one of my favorite plugin. There are some problems with this plugin. It can’t read Alexa and Twittercounter widget and you need to create a folder name “cache” manually in your hosting account. For example://atniz/wp-contents/plugins/wp-minify/cache This plugin alone saves me almost 4s time in load time. It is worth to go this hassle.
My previous load time for Atniz.com was 14s using T1 (1.44Mbps) and after page load optimization, it loads at 5.73s on T1 Internet connection line. Check your website or blog load time now. Here, you can get detailed objects and its load time on your blog. Now, you can identify and remove those widgets that drag your page load time easily. What is your current load time and after optimization load time?
Your blog is really fast now. I use blogger and have a lot of widgets that I don’t want to let go. I try to optimize loading time all the time. Currently first page loading is about 12-14 secs, with cache (second loading) 3-4 secs. I think this is ok.
Wow! Congrats! I wish to reach that level.
Sir what is the difference of using wp-cache in non-wp-cache? PROS and CONS
thanks in advance
-kyle
You can check that using the load time checking tools. We just wanted to increase the load time.
Good advice, follow the instructions and you will sure to have your page load up faster,
Thanks. I hope you have benefited from it too.
It really interesting to see just how hard Google are beginning to clamp down on everybody. A lot of people will feel the pinch this year if a lot of the rumors come into fruition.
I guess we should be seeing cleaner search results.
Technically Google owns us all. I guess, they can do whatever they want.
Google surely has the most influence when it comes to SEO and web marketing, but gladly there are still a lot of fishes in the pool.
Yes, they are the policy maker of today’s online marketing industry. Luckily, other big fish like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, etc have their own roles.
I haven’t using some of the plugins that you have mentioned above. I used to have wp-cache for my website!
I hope you could try it and see the difference yourself. I was amazed using those plugins.
My wordpress was really slow but now I have removed all unwanted plugins as you mentioned. Thanks for sharing.
It is not the browser. It is the plugin your wordpress.
Its all about the caffeine update and by March I think the speed of all sites will be a massive factor in seo results and google listings.
Caffeine is going to create a big havoc for webmasters in January. I guess, they already implementing it.