Speed Up Your Slow Loading Blog Theme

Thu, Feb 28, 2008

There is no better way to irritate your readers and prevent new RSS subscriptions than to use a slow loading theme.

When we are online, everyone expects instant content. Three seconds or less!

None of us have the patience to wait for a page to slowly put itself together. Online, anything more than 10 seconds is an ETERNITY!

Imagine our shock then when we found out from a few readers that Web2Center was taking upwards of 10 seconds to load in some browsers.

Yikes!

Speeding Up

We thought we’d done a pretty good job re-coding this theme and cleaning out the turtle-ish elements. So, fortunately, our troubling discovery coincided with a post from my favorite SEO blogger that explained, from a insightful technical standpoint, what one could do to accelerate a Wordpress blog’s load time.

The post is here: Speed Up and Clean Your Wordpress by Joost de Valk

I recommend reading the comments in this post but don’t get overwhelmed by the tech-speak. These guys are super coders who like to analyze every aspect of Joost’s posts.

Just stick to the recommendations -line by line- and your load time is sure to decrease.

You Tell Us

So far, we have activated wp-cache and cleaned up the footer per the instructions. Next steps are the header.php tweaks that Joost suggests and adding a “function_exists” qualifier to appropriate php commands.

These adjustments have certainly improved load times on my end but, for me, it had always loaded in 3-5 seconds so… you tell us… is Web2Center still loading slow?

And… If you are a fellow Wordpress blogger, I hope you enjoy Joost’s SEO blog.

4 Comments For This Post

Joost de Valk Says:
January 29th, 2008 at 4:37 pm

Thanks for the great feedback Tom! Glad you liked my post

Stephan Miller Says:
January 29th, 2008 at 5:37 pm

A lot of it has to do with any javascript on the site to. I have run into blogs that would not load for 10 minutes or more because one of the scripts slowed things to a crawl. But your site comes through fast.

Tom Deeter Says:
January 29th, 2008 at 5:44 pm

Thanks for the feedback Stephan! That is like music to my ears…

Michael Cruz Says:
February 9th, 2008 at 9:01 pm

It is important to note for bloggers inexperienced with coding that the point of wp-cache and other similar plugins in to essential streamline the content on the page. As one of those inexperienced bloggers, i now know that this may mean functions that enable your sidebar or adsense ads may be deactivated. So, when you are going to run a caching program, I think you really have to understand the “adding a �function_exists� qualifier” and what that means to your site. Again, im not upto speed on this, but after trying to activate a caching plugin, the pages came up essentially black except for the post text. After deactivating the plugin, I had to manually add code to my sidebar.php templates to get my site back to the way it was. I know there must be an easier way to accomplish what I was trying to do, but the point I want to make is inexperience bloggers must not be lulled into sleep by all of the great add ons. You really have to understand the basics of coding - so when things go wrong you will have a background to begin trouble shooting. Great post!

Joost de Valk Says:
January 29th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Thanks for the great feedback Tom! Glad you liked my post
Stephan Miller Says:
January 29th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
A lot of it has to do with any javascript on the site to. I have run into blogs that would not load for 10 minutes or more because one of the scripts slowed things to a crawl. But your site comes through fast.
Tom Deeter Says:
January 29th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Thanks for the feedback Stephan! That is like music to my ears…
Michael Cruz Says:
February 9th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
It is important to note for bloggers inexperienced with coding that the point of wp-cache and other similar plugins in to essential streamline the content on the page. As one of those inexperienced bloggers, i now know that this may mean functions that enable your sidebar or adsense ads may be deactivated. So, when you are going to run a caching program, I think you really have to understand the “adding a �function_exists� qualifier” and what that means to your site. Again, im not upto speed on this, but after trying to activate a caching plugin, the pages came up essentially black except for the post text. After deactivating the plugin, I had to manually add code to my sidebar.php templates to get my site back to the way it was. I know there must be an easier way to accomplish what I was trying to do, but the point I want to make is inexperience bloggers must not be lulled into sleep by all of the great add ons. You really have to understand the basics of coding - so when things go wrong you will have a background to begin trouble shooting. Great post!