Ever watch your site slow to a crawl when loading just to notice that it is third party content trying to load? We bloggers love to add third party banners, scripts, widgets, advertising and other content on our blogs for various reasons. Some of us get carried away with all of those extras and prevent those with slower connections from gaining access to our site.
The first step is to decide what is absolutely necessary and what can get tossed out of there. We must weigh the benefits and the cost. In this case the cost is load time. Seriously, is it that important for your site visitors to know what time it is in eight countries or what your favorite song is? Ok, so we drop what’s not important.
Here’s an interesting topic on The Internet Marketers Guild about third party directory buttons on our blogs: Is It A Fair Link Exchange?
Next we can consider hosting some of those images. If it’s necessary to display a banner we may be better off hosting the banner on our site/server to prevent the third party’s server slowing our site down.
Ok, now we can rearrange a few things. We can limit or at least reduce the impact of those slower sites by placing that extra content below our main content. If you have to add a script in your HTML between the <body> & </body> tags go to the bottom and place it just above the </body> tag. If you want to add your favorite third party widgets such as BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog, Friend Connect, Entrecard etc. then move them to the bottom of the page. The footer is good and if you can display them only on the index page by going just above the footer that’s even better. Now if those third party sites are running a little slow for whatever reason your content will still load giving site visitors more than a blank page to look at.
As an example take a look at where the Extreme Ezine displays their widgets and banners. Just above the footer on the index page only.
Dennis Edell (32)
Suzanne Vara (15)
Andrew (11)
Brian D. Hawkins (11)
Chris Roane - Mon... (10)
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Brian,
I can do enough damage slowing down my site and I host most everything I have on my site. The girls are adding a few widgets to their sites and for some reason they are not slowing the blogs down that are noticeable.
I was totally aware of the issues that can be involved by pulling from another server to yours. Like I said, I can slow down load time pretty well on my own I don’t need to be waiting on anyone else.
Very good point, the next issue to address is having images on your site that are being used off site burning up your bandwidth.
Brad West ~ onomoney
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Thanks Brad, that’s a good point about burning up our bandwidth. Another thing to consider when weighing the pros and cons.
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Twitter: SherylLoch
April 1, 2009 at 11:40 am
I have been to sites that are soooo slow to load that I will just leave. If it has info that I really want, I just go to the big G and look for another site.
The picture bandwidth thieves are a big problem and people never even think about it. They ask people to place buttons and banners but, never think how having several of those can hurt their site more than help it. I understand it is great for advertising and it may be worth it to have them use your image.
Then you have those that just link to the picture of your dog so they can use it and they are not only using your picture but, also your bandwidth.
If you click the link in my name, you will find a post I started about this topic.
You having so many pictures may have thieves around.
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I agree Sheryl. Slow load times is why I removed a bunch of items from my blogs. I still need more clean up but it’s funny how attached we get to certain things on our sites.
Bandwidth theft is on my ‘posts to do’ list. That list is growing much faster than my writing ability so look for it between now and then next ten years
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Great points. I actually hadn’t thought of adding some of it to my own hosting. I have noticed my site slow down a little lately. I’ll have to move some of those slow loading widgets to the bottom!! Great information.
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Hi Onna, It’s nice to see you here. Let me know how that goes for you. You have a great looking site.
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Twitter: bethany_north
July 2, 2009 at 4:27 pm
I totally agree with weeding out your third-party content and throwing out what isn’t totally necessary for your site, especially since people will definitely leave if it is loading so slowly that it is annoying.
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I try to keep anything loading from another site to a minimum for maximum speed!
-Adam
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