If you could do something nice for your blog buddies one thing would be to let them know if their blog is taking forever to load. I could not keep something like this from any of my blog friends because I know what can happen when a blog takes forever to load. I know because I am someone that doesn’t have a lot of time on my hands. So…if your blog takes forever to load and I am your friend…I’m gonna tell ya!
You have aproximately 5 seconds, give or take, for your readers to decide if your post or your blog is worth visiting. When somebody clicks through, the first thing that may have attracted them to your blog right from the git-go are the following:
1.) The Name of Your Blog: The name of your blog is important because it’s the first thing a person is going to retain if everything else about your blog is of interest while under serious consideration.
2.) The Title of Your Post: The title of your post is important because in the first couple of seconds it takes to read it, the reader has already decided based on that point alone if they are going to bother with the first few sentences of your post. Why? Because time is of the essence and they have several hundred more blogs to read.
3.) The First Few Sentences: The first few sentences of your post are equally as important as the post title because a lot of the time, serious blog readers have attempted to try you out by adding you to their news reader. In order to get your readers to click through to your post you need to capture their attention. Literally capture it!
4.) Page Loading Time: Out of everything that I have listed so far I think page loading time has the power to do A LOT. Page Loads and how long they take will make you or break you. Let’s face it – we live in a society that doesn’t have a lot of time to spend waiting for your page to load. If your page takes forever to load people are going to throw their hands up and go to the next blog.
We don’t want people to throw their hands up. We want people to read your blog, be interested in what you are writing about AND become a FAN of YOUR BLOG.
If people have told you that your blog is slow loading one way to figure out what is bogging it down is to try pulling it up using Mozilla Firefox. When a site is loading up on Mozilla, if you gaze towards the bottom left hand side of the page, you will begin to see a listing of sites where data is trying to transfer. It’s the transferring of data that really slows things down. Typically that information will pop up due in part to widgets and if you look towards that bottom left hand corner you will see which sites the data is being transferred to.
If you are a fan of widgets in your sidebar just know that this is a loading hazard and the more widgets you use the worse it becomes and the longer it takes for your blog to load. It used to be that images slowed a page down but that’s just not the case now that more and more people are on a high speed connection. It’s the Widgets that you want to pay attention to – the widgets and everything in your sidebar.
So ask yourself this – why the widget? Is it because you want people to know that you are interested in that site or that you belong to that site? If that’s the case then you are better off deleting the widget and creating a section in your sidebar or a page (depending on your blogging platform) strictly for that purpose. A text link will go a long way AND it won’t make your page slow to load.
Take for example my blogs Domestic Divapalooza and I Am Pooped – I have a section titled “Angela’s Stuff” – So instead of putting up the Facebook widget, you could put up the link to your Facebook page from “Your Stuff” and/or list whatever networking program you belong to instead of adding their widget. Trust me when I say that too many widgets on your blog is a complete and total loading problem.
Before I end this post I would just like to say that I love it when people write and tell me something that bugs them about any or all of my blogs. I wish more people would tell me what they think because maybe there is something wrong with my blog and I’ll never know it because nobody will tell me? I tend to try and give the type of help that I want people to help me with. With that stated, I hope that if you see something that bugs you about my blogs that you will tell me and do so right away! Until next time – HaPpY BlOgGiNg!!!!
Last time we talked about Spring Cleaning Your Blog
Next time we’ll talk about The Sidebar, Networking, and Buttons. Last time we talked about Spring Cleaning your blog. This post was brought to you by BlogMommas.com a Tuesday’s Tip Jar original.
