I guess so. I put Slideshow widget on one of my blog and this widget is the last one to be loaded into the page. I think I'll put it down to rest since it's not generating any income and slowing down my page
Oh yes, definitely, I had the slideshow widget on a blog, and it looked great, but just took forever to load. Wasn't worth it...
To speed up your sites, try placing your css file higher up in the head section, also, try loading your javascript files last or lower in your pages. If you reference all of your images in a css file, chances are your site will have a big improvement in speed. I have heard of the amazon widgets slowing down websites a bit. You might want to check out these best practices for speeding up your website. Good luck. PuReWebDev
I think the OP was referring to Amazon Widgets such as the slideshow widget, not Amazon Associates in general These widgets look really cool, but they are Flash/JavaScript or something, and take an age to load, though they shouldn't actually stop the whole page loading, they usually display a progress bar, so I'm not sure if that is what's happening here. Anyway, there's nothing much you can do about THAT, that's down to the speed of the connection between your visitor and Amazon's server, obviously... And like I say, for me it looked great, but it had to go...
For me amazon widgets do take a lot longer to load and can slow down your site in my experience so I don't use them.
Thank you for feed back. So it wasn't only me experiencing this slow down, I've removed the fancy amazon widget (java based I guess) which by the way didn't earn anything for me. I have now only one add from amazon, a simple one.
Yes, it's slowing down, but not more than loading a similar flash based thing from your own hosting, it's a general problem with flash/java stuff. I'm not a big fan of fancy stuff, I think usability is much more important than bling-bling, so I rarely use it.
I don't even recall having seen these widgets used on ANY blog. They're there in Associates if you want them, but it seems most don't. I agree they are no different from any other content, but with an ad I guess you want it loaded FAST and served to the visitor - the punter is unlikely to wait 30 seconds for it to load...
I always use only one product text/image link on one page. The fancy widgets make visitor waiting for downloding items. Amazon must improve them. aStore is best one of channels to promote your Amazon products by your Ass ID.