Eoghan O’Neill over at Promenade has put together a list of all the technology blogs long-listed for this years Irish Blog Awards and compared them based on the size of the homepage. This blog came in at 15th out of a possible 21 listed blogs. That’s not a Good Thing.
I was surprised that my blog was that heavy, but I was even more surprised that I wasn’t the heaviest blog listed. As technology bloggers we spend a lot of time griping about the substandard broadband infrastructure that this country labours under, and as a group we should be more aware of the fact that for too many people in this country, dial-up is the only method of Internet access available. For these users, the larger the page, the longer it takes to download and render. Pass a certain threshold and the viewer will lose interest and move somewhere else, without ever having seen your page. So smaller is certainly better.
Eoghan mentions the fact that ten of the sites listed do not have GZIP Compression enabled on the server. This site, unfortunately, was one of them. Using GZIP Compression allows the server to compress the data and then send it to the browser which will then decompress the page before rendering it for the use to see. On a dial-up connection this could significantly speed up the rendering.
As required by my hosting provider, I having caching enabled on my blog to lower the amount of SQL queries required to generate popular pages. Caching has a number of advantages, the main one being that it lessens the load on the server, and once the page is added to the cache, it can be pulled directly without any further SQL queries to the database. This can speed up the site somewhat, but only if the following conditions are met:
- The page has been previously requested,
- The page has not changed since the last request, and
- The page has not expired from the cache.
Even if a page is cached, it still remains the same size and therefore will take just as long to download and render, so any time savings are on the server side. On the other hand compressing the page will add to the server load, but means that a smaller amount of data needs to be transmitted to the requesting browser, so the page will render faster. Caching helps the server, compression helps the visitor.
In order to gain the greatest rendering speeds without pushing the server too hard it would be nice to be able to use the both of these technologies in tandem. Unfortunately the WordPress plugin I use only works if compression is disabled. So it’s a a bit of a quandary. I can speed up my site for the visitor or I can comply with my hosting providers request to use caching.
So I’ve decided to take some of Eoghan’s advice – I’ve removed the images from my last post which knocked almost 270K off the size of the main page alone, I’ve cut the number of posts on the front page from 10 to 7, and I’ve also removed a couple of the bigger widgets. Hopefully, the next time that Eoghan runs a test like this, this site will be closer to the top than the bottom.