How To: Determing Your Blog’s Load Time

Posted by Kyle Eslick on September 24th, 2007 | Category and Tags

This is the first of a series of posts designed to discuss ways to monitor and improve your blog’s performance. 

If you run a lower traffic blog and are looking to increase your readership, there are several things you can do to help people find your blog.   The problem is, once they’ve found your website, it can sometimes be difficult to retain them as a reader.  This is especially true if most of your traffic comes from search engines or sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

Whether you believe it or not, website performance actually plays a big part in keeping that unique visitor’s attention long enough to read your content.   If your website takes to long to load, it is unlikely that your potential reader will even stay long enough to see the full page load.

Luckily, there are several free tools to help you monitor your blog’s load time and figure out what is slowing it down.  The site I use primarily is called OctaGate SiteTimer.  Simply enter your blog’s URL, click Start, and it will do a quick check and display the results.  This whole process can be completed in 15-20 seconds!

Other sites that accomplish the same or similar goals are:

This should give you a good idea of what hangups are taking place when your website is loading.  Your goal should be to have your website load in under 7 seconds.   If it is taking longer, give some consideration to removing the culprits, which will usually be extra widgets appearing somewhere on your blog (MyBlogLog widget, Alexa widget, BlogCatalog widget, Good Blogs, Blogrush, etc.).   Also, some advertising services may add to your page load time if they are a smaller service with servers that have trouble handling the load.

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  1. Comment by Madhur Kapoor on September 24th, 2007:

    Nice tools , i am looking forward to reading the rest of your series .

  2. Comment by Kyle Eslick on September 24th, 2007:

    Madhur – Thanks! The rest are written and scheduled to be posted the rest of the week so check back! :D

  3. Comment by Joe Justin on September 24th, 2007:

    Kyle,

    Not only is this an awesome post but the tool you gave us is even better. It gives you a list of all the things that are being loaded as well as the times.

    My site was averaging between 10-12 seconds. very slow. I took off blogcatalog widget, technorati favorite icon, PlugIM widget, Chose to have my social bookmarks only appear on a single post got it around 7 seconds. Then I noticed that the polling widget was slowing things down. SO I deactivated that, I am now in the five seconds consistently.

    I also stumbled the article so if some of you other readers want to vote it’s really easy just hit your stumlble button to vote for it.

  4. Comment by Ola from Gaza on November 21st, 2007:


    Thank you very uch for this usefull article ..
    Actually It’s exactly what I was looking for … i’ve been tring to figure out why my blogs needs a loooot of time to load .. and this would defenitely help me to solve the problem

    Thanks a lot

    Ola
    A blogger from Palestine

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