look.
I blogrolled you because i like to read what you write. I use about six different computers during the day, several of which are old dogs.
Your blog may have the most awesome graphics and the ads make you wads of cash, but if it takes more than ten seconds to load on my slowest computer im just not going to visit that often.
Alger recently proved that it is possible to have an attractive blog that doesnt take forever to load. If your words dont stand on their own without pretty graphics to support them, at least cut down the post count displayed on the front page or back off the fucking ads some. Not everyone has a superfast computer, not everyone has a big data pipe.
13 comments Og | Uncategorized
I know of one blog in particular that I don’t visit any more for that very reason. Won’t name names, though, since you aren’t.
Additionally, some of those ad-laden blogs use an ad-posting widget that security monitoring programs interpret as a threat, and close the browser.
If you want to write, write. If you want to advertise, advertise. Don’t try both on the same page, that’s just lazy. It costs what, $10 to put up a WordPress blog? If you can’t afford $10/month, you probably shouldn’t even have paid internet access. If you have to support blogging by posting ads, your blogging probably suffers as a result because of your divided attention. I probably don’t click on one out of 100 blog-ads I encounter, and most of those are accidental clicks. I’ve NEVER bought anything from a blog-ad.
Sometimes I debate myself about putting ads up again. Mostly I don’t because I hated how they slowed my site down, money or no money.
What I’m really, really hating lately is all the sites with a huge popup ad that you MUST click to go away. Very uncool.
Amen.
My wordpress blog is free.
AND it’s screaming fast which I appreciate a LOT.
FWIW, some tips.
Use a flexible layout. There’s a CSS grid that works great with WordPress that will support anything from the big pipes to teensy phone screens.
DO NOT hot link anything. Which, unfortunately, includes remote-served ads. But also content. Download, size, and ftp jpegs to your own server. Video embeds seem to work OK, but everything else, feed from your own server.
AND DO scale your images before you upload them. Serve them at life-size. Don’t make your visitor’s browser resample your gigabyte photo of Rebecca Black.
DO NOT link to Facebook. Period. They take forever to load their own pages. What makes you think they’ll serve a logo to you for your page any faster? If you use a social button bar, make sure you’re serving the images yourself.
And I refuse to use automatic code. As in Dreamweaver or Front Page or any of them. Hand-code is MUCH tighter and faster. It also forces you to find and fix the little glitches that slow down your page loads.
M
Mark’s right about everything. I always resize images to the actual size I want them (650 px wide) and I never hot-link but always store everything on my own server. Makes a huge difference.
Amazes me how many bloggers have no clue about this shit and think they are just THAT GOOD that they can post all kinds of extraneous graphics and code, and it won’t deter anyone. Chumps.
I have several blogs whose content I miss a LOT because they won’t clean up their acts. Very disapopinting.
I find the slowest thing is “social” add-ons.
“Oh, look. Stumbleupon is being slow today.
That means your website is taking an extra 30 seconds to load.
That means I’m not going to read it.”
I second Hale. Amen, brother. And Rachel. Those stupid pop ups. And every time I hit a hyperlink on NRO it opens an ad window. Whaddafukupwiddat?
Glad I’m not the only one who’s noticed. I was beginning to think it was on my end.
Nathan, you have it in a nutshell. I’m only saying it because nobody else does. And those big sites that I can’t load for five minutes or that lock up my computer have enough traffic I’m sure they don’t miss me, but damn. I GO THERE FOR THE WORDS, NOT THE PRETTY.
Also: It works fine on my Apple! Makes me want to nuke your neighborhood.