Monday, December 19, 2011

How long does it take your average blog-page to load?

If you use Google Analytics on your blog, then you can get data about how fast your pages(*) load. This is seen in the the Site Speed report which was turned on for all users in mid November

Analytics have now published more information about what it contains, too.

Blogger users can't control some of the items that are shown (redirection time, domain lookup time, server connection time, server response time) - although you may like to keep an eye on them if you are concerned about whether the Blogger platform is suitable your blog/website.

But we do have a lot of control over page(*) download time. This is impacted by the size of our posts (especially the picutres and videos), and by the widgets that we use.

How much difference  page-load speed makes to you and your visitors (how many pages they view, and how likely they are to come back) depends on your niche and how impatient they are.

As with lots of web-statistics, there are no hard-and-fast rules. I recommend keeping an eye out for change.

  • For example, if adding a widget adds one second to your average load time, but there is no change to visitor numbers or pages per visit, you probably don't have an issue.
  • But if it adds 0.5 seconds and pages/visitor decreases by 50%, you might need to think about whether the widget is worth it, or whether you need to do something like only display it on the home page.


(*) These "pages" are not the same as so-called "pages" in Blogger: read more about the difference. LINK

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