I have been trying to redesign my site and speed up it's load time recently, and I believe I have done a good job, but the load speed test sites are inconsistent in their measurements. Most of the time, it clocks in at 2 seconds, but every now and then, it is something outrageous like 10 seconds. Is this just a fluke or can I do something to fix it? (Also, what would you say is the best site for measuring load speed?) Also, my sidebar is on the right, but it continuous to load first, what can I do about that. My site is http://juicedsportsblog.com for refferrence.
Took about 30 seconds for me. I'm on 8meg broadband, but I am downloading so that would add a bit, but not that much.
It depends on how they run their tests, they shouldnt be using caching to give an accurate figure. Assuming they are not then the 2 second result is the indication of how good the code itself is. Any variation from this for the same user will be down to computer speeds at both ends and the network in between the two. There is nothing that can be done with the code to prevent the variations but may be worth looking at how much load is being put on the server and their network
Since load time depends on ping times, the number of files, and the total size - you can usually figure it out for yourself. I usually ballpark 200ms overhead per file, 5k/sec for dialup... and don't worry about broadband because if the dialup figure is acceptable, broadband is golden. Your page totals 302k in 62 files - THAT is unacceptably huge in my book, easily six times as many files and three times the filesizes that should be needed - especially for a page with only 7k of actual 'content' text and roughly 100k of 'content' images. At that size you are looking at dialup users being choked to 72 seconds download time best case on 'first load' - and even most broadband users are looking at over twelve seconds JUST for handshaking to get all those files - possibly even more than that since you would also have to handshake connects for the files that aren't hosted from the same URL (which accounts for roughly 70% of the files linked in!) Of course, being that you are back-ended by Blogger (wow, that phrase is strangely appropriate), this is hardly a shock... excessive wrapping, classitis, inlined presentation, inlined styles, the source code alone reads like 'how not to code a web page'... between the endless clearing DIV's and 360 validation errors, I'm half shocked we're not seeing use of spacer .gif's and - and that's before we even get into the 100k of javascript that 96% of which appears to do... nothing. (especially that 25k 'techorati' crap)
It took me 17.6 seconds to fully load the page on 20 Megabit cable. There were over 60 HTTP requests, which is quite a lot. The digitalpoint forum index for example needs less than half that number. The biggest time wasters are your actual pages, the CSS file, your Technorati widget and just about all your large images (like This one). My approach would be to reconsider your page design and minimize HTTP requests by lowering the number of required images. You should also try compressing your images a little, but to be honest they don't seem that overweight to me. At the moment I'm not sure why your images are slow to load.
Well, what can I do? Get rid of pictures? I used to have a ton of bs on it but I got rid of a lot of it, and now there's not much left to get rid of to condense it.
You could make the pictures smaller in size, that'd make it a bit faster. I'd take the recent posts out of the sidebar. People can just look at the homepage to see the recent blogs you have made.
Look here for a detailed breakdown of your site. http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/wso.php?url=http://www.juicedsportsblog.com/