Optimizing Blogger for Speed

No, I am not obsessed with speed if you have mistakenly got the impression after seeing this post and how to design an efficient blog. I live in an unfortunate area with an Internet connection averaging around 8 Kb per second, which is 1/13 of those who live 10 kilometers to the east and west of me. The tel-co will supposedly make some infrastructure improvements only after January, 2009. Well, at least that is what they claim. I can handle a slow connection but it is really annoying to wait for my own blog to load for 40 seconds. So I decided to make it leaner for my own sake.

Before writing this post, I pulled down various statistics of the site (home page only) to help me improve a bit:

Total HTML: 19,899 bytes, compressed;
Total images: 53,785 bytes;
JavaScript: 230,649 bytes;
CSS: 8,417 bytes;
Total CSS imports: 4.

Looking at the above figures, it is apparent that there are only two areas I can make some improvements: JavaScript and CSS imports. I focused on cutting back the scripts without losing too much from functionality, leaving CSS imports to some other time.

There were nine of them before writing this post and the heaviest ones being:

blogger-widgets: 131,819 bytes;
jquery: 55,774 bytes.

It would be absurd to get rid of the widgets script as it provided core functionality to all blogger sites, so jquery had to go despite the fact CommentLuv was one of my favorite plug-ins (I am planning to reinstall it if Tel-co proves worthy of its promises, though). For some reason, the syncing of the comments did not work and the comments made so far disappeared. I will work on it, or in the worst case write them myself. Meanwhile, I encourage you to input your last post manually, as this is a great way to discover new and interesting content.

One site that you can check the speed of your blog is Web Page Analyzer. It will show you potential problem areas and thereby guiding you to provide your readers a better experience. I strongly suggest to all blogger users to take a look and make a few adjustments.

While going through all this trouble, I changed my template to a more stylish (hopefully) one. I hope you will like it.

Comments

  1. Lover Boy and GirlDecember 4, 2008 at 10:41 PM

    Hello,

    Improving a blog's speed is indeed one of the vital things bloggers should consider. The readers always like sites that are accessible and fast.

    Thank you for sharing! Kudos!

    ReplyDelete
  2. L. Venkata SubramaniamDecember 5, 2008 at 7:26 AM

    excellent idea....I have always wondered how to improve the speed of upload. On alexa it says my blog is in the 50 percentile so obviously there is a lot of scope for improvement. let me try it out!

    ReplyDelete

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