As blogs grow and try to cram more and more stuff on their homepage, load times are becoming a bigger problem. According to Royal Pingdom, 74 of the top 100 blogs have home pages crammed with so much stuff (more than 500 kilobytes) that anyone without broadband might be frustrated by the load times. TechCrunch falls into this category, as does the Huffington Post, Engadget, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, Lifehacker, and even the Official Google Blog. The homepage of the New York Times, for comparison purposes, weighs in at 750 kilobits.
And 35 of the top 100 blogs have home pages of more than one megabyte. Even with a 1 megabit/second broadband connection, it still takes 8.4 seconds to load a 1MB page. (And 22 seconds with a 384 kilobit/ second connection). That is way too long.
Sadly, our home page weighs in at 1.2 megabytes. But you should have seen it before the redesign. It is about five times faster now. We are still not satisfied and are working hard to get the load times down.
Across all 100 blogs, the biggest factors contributing to load times is too many images (61.5%) and scripts (17.3%). Those are the big culprits on our home page as well. But we are not going to get rid of all the images, we are working on better ways to automatically resize them. And for scripts, we’d like to get it so that we load only the ones we need at any given time instead of loading all the scripts on the page at once.
Below are the 26 blogs with home pages smaller than 500 kilobytes: