I’ve continued hacking away at this blog to try and speed up the page load times and I have got it to load in just under 3 seconds thanks to the terrific HttpWatch software.

With HttpWatch you can actually see the load times of each part of the page and I was able to see that a whole load of subscribe links were each taking half a second to load, so a lot of those went west. Also ads were slow so they went. I also noticed that there were several failures at load times and eventually managed to track those down and sort the problem out.

One problem in particular, where I had tried to setup the facility to post blog entries via email, which I never got working anyway, and caused a real problem where it took nearly 3 seconds to fail. This was for something confusingly called www.site.tld/wp-mail.php. I searched for that on Google and found only 2 hits, both in China. Thank heavens the text was in English. This did point out that the non-working www.site.tld/wp-mail.php file was likely to be buried in the footer.php file, which it was, and which I then got rid of.

To speed the page loading up any more isn’t going to be easy. I can see that the slowest parts to be loaded are those links, obviously, not on the Wordpress servers. These are for Clustrmaps, Technorati, Quote of the Day and other bits and pieces. If I got rid of all that the page would probably load in about 2 seconds but there wouldn’t be much left of the blog.

To think I test software for a living yet I never tested the load times of my own blog. Shameful.

I did have an issue where I de-activated a plug-in but some PHP code was still trying to use it. Result: the page wouldn’t load and I couldn’t figure out the URL to login. Don’t panic (Why not, seems like a good idea to me? Ed). I eventually managed to login and re-activate the plug-in and the page loaded OK.

I just downloaded HttpWatch and have been playing with it whilst loading various web sites and also this page and is it slow?

I started with the BBC news page and that loaded in 1.6 seconds. Then I tried this kockamamie page and it took 19 seconds. What is this, 1996? I started digging around and found that I display the last 20 blog entries on his page (Are you crazy? Ed). I changed that to just the last blog entry and then the page loaded in 11 seconds. So now we’re at about 1998. I then removed the adverts on the left side of the page, three of them, and that got it down to just over 9 seconds. There are 10 adverts on the right side of the page which I’ll remove later. That should make some difference.

I have a Sitemeter count and the load time for that was about 8 seconds. But if I lose that there will be no hit count, not that Sitemeter is at all reliable. In fact it misses about 80% of the hits. To get it to display any kind of valid stats I have to get valid hit counts from the servers logs and manually add them as a starting figure to Sitemeter and I only do that every couple of months. Maybe I should ditch Sitemeter and just display a string of text with the known totals from the servers logs.

Later: I commented out the Sitemeter code and though it was taking a long time to load, now its not there oddly the load time for the page has gone up to 11 seconds. Huh! Further investiagtion revealed that it is the Technorati stuff on the right side of the page. It was obviously loading quicker before but the three widgets are now taking about 5 seconds to load. Of course I could get rid of all links, that would speed it up. Hmmm… 

My aim has to be to get it to load in 2 seconds. Inneresting.