Shooting at Bubbles

For the past little while I have been fighting an ongoing battle to try and cut the time it is taking for the blog to load and it has led to an interesting observation of what people think is too long for that blog page to load. I wrote about this previously and ended up getting some great suggestion in the comments which over the past few days I have implemented.

Everything from hard-coding paths instead of using the WordPress tags which require calls to the database through to finally installing WP-SuperCache which is a handy tool for speeding up page display. I’ve double checked the graphics being used to make sure they aren’t contributing to the problem and still I come back to my original thinking that this is a WordPress problem.

Even after everything I have done the best page load speed I can get is 7 seconds and while this may not seem like a lot there are folks who think this is too long. Long enough that they will hit the next button and think twice about coming back. Is it reasonable for them to expect the pages to load quicker or are they just being exceptionally picky?

It doesn’t really matter either way because it’s their 7 seven seconds that they don’t want to be wasting waiting for some page to load. The problem is that there comes a point that from the blog owners point of view there is nothing else that they can do – everything has been tried and if there are improvements to be made it nothing you can do.

7 seconds may not seem like a lot but as a blog owner you might want to keep in mind that something as simple as 7 seconds can make the difference in readers returning another day – or not.