Comments on: Load size analysis of the top 100 blogs

By: karen

karen — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:54:08 +0000

Sometimes you just cant win…like mentioned already, it HAS to look good, or people will not stick around, but if its too slow, they leave. Such the issue…I am trying some WP cache now, i think it helps but not really sure…Thanks
Karen

By: Pingdom

Pingdom — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:16:54 +0000

@Andy: Thanks. Interesting comparison there. Thanks for the heads up!

You might also want to check out a report we did a couple of weeks later, about overall image use on websites:

http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/12/08/new-facts-and-figures-about-image-format-use-on-websites/

By: Andy King

Andy King — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:05:50 +0000

Excellent article. I’ve updated the survey with the CSS statistics from the top 100 blogs, and compared the results to the top 1000 website survey we performed earlier this year. You can see the results at:

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-top-100-weblog/

By: Aurelius Tjin

Aurelius Tjin — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:45:39 +0000

Hey, that’s a very great analysis mate! I want to do a similar analysis of my blog to figure some stuff out. Thanks for the heads up!

By: Who killed the blogosphere? (Nicholas Carr, Rough Type, 7/11/08) : Centro de Estudios de Medios

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:54:47 +0000

[...] One good indicator is page bloat. The Register’s John Oates points today to a revealing study of the growing obesity of once slender blog pages. “Blog front pages are now large pages of [...]

By: David Coveney

David Coveney — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:19:47 +0000

There’s really no excuse for weighty sites – but it has to be said that a combination of designers who favour eye-candy over performance and functionality (yes, good looks are important, but only if you have a chance of seeing them – pity people on a poor link) and bloggers who have a bad case of plugin-itis have to stop and think.

When we’re building themes for WordPress or clients (I’m trying not to self-promote here, but bear with me) we make a point of testing on devices such as mobile phones, and with a throttled broadband connection. Ultimately it matters a lot of your users can’t read your content. If you service a community of broadband connected geeks it’s probably not so bad, but if you’re trying to reach a broad audience then it’s important to test test test. Yslow is your friend.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:40:45 +0000

Great article. As has been said, great work on the graphs.

By: Pingdom

Pingdom — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:18:48 +0000

Thanks for the comments.

_ck_: Yes, flash objects are not seen as images. Images are only png, gif and jpegs linked in the HTML and CSS code.

By: Shantanu Goel

Shantanu Goel — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 05:30:27 +0000

I recently analyzed the same thing about my site. I used a lot of images for my blog’s navigation layouts etc and was running out of bandwidth every month. The main page total size stood at around 500 kb. I then switched to a newer layout that minimized the use of images and did its things with css and colors. Result: Main page now stands at < 80k. Bandwidth usage has also been cut into less than 1/4th.

By: redwall_hp

redwall_hp — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 02:11:06 +0000

Let’s see… My blog, Webmaster-Source, currently clocks in at about 471 kilobytes for it’s home page. There are 44 images, 57k worth of HTML and CSS, and 11 scripts. The tool I used to gather this data estimated 1.8 minutes to load the front page at 56k. Ouch. I’m still beating the pants of TechCrunch and company though.

I’m also planning a redesign to try to declutter the blog while making it look better visually, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to make load times a little quicker while I’m at it.

Another major bottleneck, though, is the server. As I’m on shared hosting for the moment, pages aren’t served as fast as they could be if I were using, say, a VPS. I’m planning on *eventually* moving to a VPS by Slicehost or Linode, which is faster by default and will allow some lower-level tweakage. I’m holding off on the move though because I want to save money while I can…