Light on the Left, Heavy on the Right
I got a fantastic suggestion (and an obvious one) on my slow page load post by Fred at WeBreakStuff:
Hey fred,
The thing causing the slow page load is the amount of widgets running on both sides of your page (particularly on the left). The way things are coded in this blog layout, content is read (by the browser) first down, then to the right. This means, the browser needs to load all the widgets on the left, then your content, then the widgets on the right.
A bit technical, now: the fact is, the whole page load is around 144 requests (and way over 1.5mb) on a VC. If you look at the difference, our blog (at http://blog.webreakstuff.com) is around 14 requests and not over 120kb, meaning it loads in less than 1 second. There are other reasons, but to put it simple: you have megs and megs of stuff on both sides of the page that nobody really looks at, while the content is given no real impact.
Hope that helped!
Posted by: Fred
Well you all know how I feel about my bling. It may be heavy. It may slow me down. But I am not going to go without it.
But I do have a new rule about my widgets. Heavy widgets will be on the right. Light ones will be one the left. I've already moved my video widgets to the right. And the page loads much faster.
Obvious. But I missed it. Thanks Fred!
Much better.
Posted by: howardhoward lindzon | October 21, 2006 at 02:50 PM
You could do better still by using CSS absolute positioning to control the column layout which would let you put the content DIV first in the HTML.
Posted by: Nic Wolff | October 21, 2006 at 07:42 PM
I can't speak for the people at webreakstuff, but I disagree with this:
"you have megs and megs of stuff on both sides of the page that nobody really looks at"
Personally I look at the avc bling on almost every visit. I want that dam gadget bling. AVC is slow, but that's what cable is good for, ya?
Posted by: David Wiseman | October 22, 2006 at 07:24 PM