Legal Commentary

Does Page Loading Time Matter?

By Michael Froomkin

Today’s Zits hit home in a way the cartoonist probably didn’t intend.

You see, Google Webmaster tools says it takes from 5 to 7.5 seconds to load this blog. Having run a bunch of tools to analyze what’s going on, most of the slowness is all the stuff going on in the right margin, although a degree of the variability may turn on how many graphics I’m showing on any given day. I’ve played some games with optimizing the code, thrown up some cache (although I think the googlebot gets the uncached version) and there is no doubt some more I can do to speed up the javascript a little, although trying to optimize javascript takes me out of my comfort zone.

But basically, either I accept that things will be slow here — slower than 70-85% of the pages google visits — or I start cutting the clock, the casualty count, the weather, and then some of the continually updated stuff like recent comments.

Given that most people read the site via RSS (hey, you’re missing out! come joint in on the comments!), does the stuff in the right margin even serve any purpose? Other than of course, I sort of like it that way?

I long ago stopped doing any of the promotional activities that help blogs get noticed. Traffic duly dropped, although it remains high enough to make both puzzled and happy. Page speed is said to be a factor that Google considers in ranking pages. Maybe I should bow to the search engine gods and drop the things that slow pages down the most?

Full post as published by Discourse.net on January 17, 2011 (boomark / email).