I’m going to be making a few changes to the home page of this site over the next day or so, so apologies in advance to anyone who stops by and notices some wonky behavior. I plan to move the Blogroll and My News sections out of the sidebars and to their own pages, with various links from the main page, to improve load times. Right now it takes as much as 16 seconds for the entire page to load on a DSL connection — which is way too long. I expected that would probably happen when I embedded the Newsgator blogroll and headlines scripts to begin with, but I wanted to watch it for a while and see how things went.

Here’s a nice article with some tips on speeding up your load time, where I learned about Numion’s Stopwatch tool — a nifty utility that can show you how long it takes to load any web page.  Another one I came across does a in-depth diagnosis of your page and displays optimization suggestions; it’s the Web Page Analyzer.

It was interesting to try the tools with several browsers, and see the performance variations. Firefox consistently came in as the slowest — by four to six seconds, sometimes more. Internet Explore was next, and Opera — which I just started using on occasion a couple of weeks ago — was the fastest by far, loading my main page nearly 50% faster than Firefox.  Firefox still rocks, though.

Stay tuned….

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 12:26 am and is filed under Blogging, Site Updates. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.