In my travels around the web today, trying to find new ways of promoting my blog, I discovered many sites that were unbearably slow, and it isn’t because of the site design itself.
No, it’s due to widget overload and widget breakdown.
If you look at the status bar at most active marketers’ sites you’ll see call to a wide array of different services. Analytics, statistic, imgy, entrecard, blogrush, momdy, bloglog, gravatar, sezwho, blogcatalog, amazons3, feed counters, Digg badges and more are common in many combinations.
Sezwho is completely down right now and making several sites I’m visiting through Etrecard intolerably slow to load, if they load at all
The problem is these services are bogging down, big time, all of them. And with several widgets relying on third party services your chances of a viewer facing a blank page increase dramatically.
This makes browsing painful and will lead to lost viewers, yet big names from all philosophies of marketing share the inclination to pile them on. Being role models this means people new to the Internet marketing arena will probably follow suit.
So if you decide to use ANY widget code or badge that requires access to a third party service take care to test the impact it has on your site at various times. And be sure you are conservative in the number of services on any page.
Traffic is growing rapidly on the Internet and so is the use of these services. This problem is sure to only get worse so you need to be proactive or your viewers will suffer and you site will die a widget death.
PS: I just removed the Digg badges from the main page of this blog because it slowed loading time by up to 45 seconds. I’d rather you see my site faster than garner a couple of extra votes. And if entreCard doesn’t improve it goes too.
PPS: Thanks for the inspiring comment @MarkEckenrode:
How Much Flare Do You Dare:
Tags: widgets, entrecard, digg, analytics, trackingservice
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Mark Eckenrode
July 19th, 2008 - 11:41 pm