Show less posts and get more readers
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In Support we obviously visit hundreds of blogs. We are all on pretty good connections yet some blogs load very very slowly. (So slowly that I will leave that to load and go answer more people. Which means a slower reply).
Someone must have told people that having every post and every image on your front page is good. It is a long way from good.
It does not help Google
It does not help your blog appear better in Google
It does not impress (“Look, mine is bigger than yours!”)
It absolutely will LOSE you readers.http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/07/blog_pages_too_big/
The default ‘Posts to show’ is 10. If you increase that and also start posting images your blog will go slow, people will get bored waiting and go somewhere else.
(Back when wordpress.com started everyone had free space of 30MB. One person got in touch with Support and said someone had told him his page would not load and that he was also not allowed to upload images. His front page had the entire 30MB of images. It would not load for someone on dialup.)
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Interesting. Aside from timing how long it takes to load, how do we find out how large our front page is? How can I tell how long a dial-up connection will take to load?
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Check http://ask.metafilter.com/48714/A-free-utility-to-measure-web-site-load-times for some useful links.
I need to clarify something above. I wrote “your blog will go slow” – what I meant was that for the reader it will take a long time to load. From the server it is as quick as normal but the images take forever.
If you use Firefox, get the Web Developer extension and from it’s Information tab you can ‘View Document Size.
1tess – according to the web developer toolbar, your front page:
Documents (1 file) 25 KB (104 KB uncompressed)
Images (58 files) 763 KB
Objects (0 files)
Scripts (4 files) 21 KB (38 KB uncompressed)
Style Sheets (2 files) 3 KB (8 KB uncompressed)
Total 813 KB (913 KB uncompressed) -
But Mark, page bloat is a problem that’s as old as dirt. Having it appear on blogs is only because blogs are the “hot” medium rather than websites.
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Hi Mark,
Thanks. I got the Firefox Web Developer extension. I’ll try displaying fewer posts! I remember how slow my old dial-up connections was. -
justjennifer – I agree. My first pages were full of js, flash, gifs, bad html too.
My point is that unless you know your page is huge then you will not know how long it actually takes to load a page. Because it is easy to upload everything and for it to ‘just work’, and because people may have fast connections and cached images then they may not appreciate what they are doing to readers.
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Mark, cheers for this post. I’ve seen some blogs with brief introduction of their 10 latest blog posts on the homepage – not full blogs. How do I do that on a wordpress.com hosted blog. Can that be done? Any help would be great. thanks
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Use the “more” tag:
http://faq.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/splitting-posts-with-the-more-tag/
Pay attention to the part about formatting issues if you have problems. -
Don’t use the More tag. It will lose you readers overall. Just reduce the number of posts on the front page as Mark suggests. There are several blogs of friends of mine which I no longer read because they’ve got that cheezy “I want to squeeze ONE MORE HIT out of you” More tag. I come to the blog to read it. Don’t make me jump through more hoops to do it, because I’ll walk away.
And yes, I’m a major page bloat offender. But my sidebar’s so long that I just want the posts to go that far, too.
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raincoaster.
I sort of share your opinion of the More tag, but the poster wanted to know how to do it. And for some people with long long posts it is a good idea, though if the post is both uninteresting and long the more tag won’t enchant me to read more… -
I use the more tag but only occasionally. Mainly I use it to keep my page about the same length as my sidebar. But I try not to have a lot of pictures/video, etc on my page at the same time. I *hate* visiting sites that fill up the page with too much stuff like that. Not only is is slow to load, but I find it distracting.
(not your blog, of course, rain :) )
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panaghiotisadam,
I’ve just looked in FAQ about the next page tag—only been marginally aware of it.
Gets me thinking: That could be useful for having an intro on page 1, a specific (a recipe in my case) on pate 2, and extras on page 3.
Would it be possible to use it in conjunction with a page jump? It might be nice to have links from page 1 to page 3 and all the other combinations. -
Safari’s developer tools and Firebug (for Firefox) both have Network Timeline tools that will show you the total size and load time for any web page, with a detailed graph of each individual item. It’s great for finding ways of speeding up your page – in most cases a few simple changes will make a big difference (like reducing the number of posts on your front page, or using smaller images).
I’ve seen people complain about their blogs being slow to load, who have 15 megabytes or more of images on their front page – that will take at least 45 minutes to load for a dialup user, and several minutes on average DSL.
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panaghiotisadam,
I have not had a chance to try nextpage, but does that mean they are separate posts done in one day? So a person could link to the separate posts. But a reader would not be able to read the entire entry/entries for the day all at once? -
@panaghiotisadam-page jumps (anchor links) work on any page you put them. I presently have an anchor link from one of my knitting Posts to a specific point on my About page.
So, yes, 1tess, you can do exactly what you mulled over above (link index on Page A to recipe on Page B).
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@1tess: No, the nextpage tag means ONE post (one URL) split into a sequence of two or more numbered pages. You click on the numbers to move from a page to another.
@justjennifer: When I tried anchor links they didn’t work that way. I’ll try again and be back!
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