I have a question for some of you squeaky wheels:
Does my blog load too slowly for you?
The reason I ask is because all the *pro-bloggers* say to get your page load time down. They say to truncate posts with a *read more* link; they say not to show nearly as many posts as I do on my front page (25).
Google says that it uses *page loading speed* in its search rankings. Why? And who knew?
I have no idea how important this is, but it's a reality I must respect.
Check out this recent graph of my blog's loading speed:
Click graphic to enlarge if necessary.
Hmmmm....what happened in March to cause that spike in slowness?
I'm going to take a closer look when I get a chance - because my site traffic got crushed over that period as well. It went from over 1,000 hits a day to about 400 daily hits. My daily traffic is starting to uptick again into the 700s now. It was frustrating somewhat because I lost all those hits precisely when I started putting the effort into reading all those professional blogger sites and precisely when I started my Better Blogging Chronicles!
I only had mere hunches as to why my site got cut down so much. For example, I've noticed that when I don't blog on the stock market for a while (including Google Finance links), my traffic tails off. Also, I heard that Google implemented one of its notoriously disruptive search algorithm upgrades recently. Perhaps I was a short-term loser in that, so I wondered.
Of course there's a method to my madness and the format of my blog, and I'm defensive about it, but yet I am still interested in feedback on this issue.
It's funny because with some things I'm extraordinarily FAST (shopping, golf, talking, etc.), while with others I prefer deliberate S-L-O-W-N-E-S-S (driving, cleaning, blog-writing, etc.).
My Latin (100% Italian) wife....she has no *gears* at all. It's all-out, full-speed ahead from wake-up to bedtime - even on weekends.
I guess people that read my blog often (as opposed to Google search traffic) already have the recent pictures and whatnot from my blog stored in their temp files (?) so my pages load rather quickly. That seems to be the case for me anyway - as my slow computer loads Marginalizing Morons rather quickly.
See also - Better Blogging Chronicles 3 - Aesthetics
4 comments:
Since being FORCED to come here to read whole posts, I have gained valuable info regarding load times of your blog.
It loads fine for me and is plenty fast. But, I have also noticed that since blogger changed the photo upload and storage thingy, my load time has dropped a bit, too.
With bandwidth and internet connection speeds rising each year....it seems almost a non-issue.
But I was taken aback when I read on Google Webmaster that they consider page-load speed in their search rankings.
Maybe I just don't get it:
I found your blog once, a long time ago, and bookmarked it.
I just read it roughly every other day.
Are there so many [potentially] new readers coming online that searching for your blog is an issue?
Anon,
Yeah. It's something ridiculous like 1 million people a day start a blog.
And I'm competing with Headbook for readership. I believe Headbook just passed Google in terms of daily traffic or something.
And with all that competition, I believe the number of *new readers* coming online is growing BUT at a much, much slower pace.
People have limited time and limited energy; they want to scan the web for photos, provocative headlines, etc.; who wants to read my blog and be forced to think? I'm targeting a niche but I believe I can do much better in that little zone.
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