Old age creeping
Is it my imagination or is this site getting very slow?
I have run some tests and depending on which ones I use, it's either quite fast or very slow, and seeing as normally this site isn't read by computers I thought I would ask my real readers.
There are a few things I could do to speed things up a bit, such as writing my ramblings without using text, as a blank page must be faster than one with a load of printing on it? Maybe I should forsake Wordress altogether and just write on one page which is rewritten each time? On second thoughts, that last idea would mean no one could comment and the comments are usually the only sensible bit.
One way I could speed up the old girl a bit would be to remove some of the crap that's running in the background. Does anyone ever use those "social buttons" on the posts – those Farcebook/Twitter/whatever buttons? They are nice and colourful but if no one uses 'em they could be dumped.
There's a thing in there called SEO which bothers me. I have heard all these nerds saying that SEO is vital and all that shit, but my readers are more important than geeky stuff, so that can go. Time to trim to the bone.
So what can I get rid of, or even what can I add?
So is it going slower, or is it just that I'm getting older and more impatient?
Aww quit tinkering with it. It works just fine
It's all right for you with your super fast high speed broadband. Some of us still live in the Dark Ages.
I'm reading your site on my iPhone and it works just fine. I'm sitting in a doctors office waiting for my appt. that was supposed to be a half hour ago.
No problems noticeable.Suspect it's you.
These rambles are great as they are.
'If it isn't broken don't fix it'
Works fine here (since I moved into the fibre age)
On a more serious note,
….if it ain't bust…….
No problems here in England. The site loads immediately, and this message is typing just fine.
loading zippy fast for me
Seems OK from here (mid UK)
Yep, works fine for me, too, and I live on a Greek island with ostensibly a 24Mbps connection, but whenever I run a speed test the best I get is about 15Mbps, and it's more often about 12Mbps. Nevertheless, your page loads more or less instantly, and posting comments isn't a problem either. Like George D says: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'.
Fuck! I'm peaking at just over 1Mbps [yes – that's one Mbps] at the moment. Anyone got the loan of a modem?
Blimey, we only get 8 maximum here!
(Well actually not here because we're in England for Christmas but at home)
Mine has decided to behave itself and I'm now getting a whopping 2.8. Seeing as it's supposed to be 3, I can't complain?
You surprise me GD, I would have thought you would have much faster speeds in Ireland than we get in the backwaters of Greece. Apparently where I've bought in Patras, they intend putting in fibre-optic lines. I'm assuming that they will have the additional infrastructure to be able to offer speeds counted in Gbps! That would be nice! At the moment when I'm there I take the laptop and tether it to my mobile phone for internet. I don't know what speed I'm getting because I haven't checked, but it's fast enough to stream the Grand Prix (and the football, which my wife watches) without pixellating or juddering. Seamless, in fact. I did a new contract with my mobile provider which reduced my call minutes (I never used them anyway) but gave me 5.5GB of data per month for the same price I was paying, which is quite handy under the circumstances.
You forget I'm in the wilds up here, and am lucky to have any sort of connection. They have been promising an improvement but it is always "next year". What I have is good enough for casual browsing and even downloading the odd film, but If I am downloading files Herself bitches like mad as it interferes with her Interweb radio! There are great plans by the gubmint to roll out high speed across the entire country, but I ain't holding my breath for that either.
well it loads fine for me in both laptop and windows phone.
No problems with the site at my end of things either and that's on 4 different machines, 2 different OSs, wired connection as well as on 2 different wireless routers plus that newfangled $50 "Fire" tablet thingy I got from Amazon. The only thing that I would consider even mildly "creeping" is the time it takes from clicking the "Post Comment" button to the comment actually showing up. Then again…it's always been that way.
HR is fine, leave it alone and stick with WordPress. And I'd also stick with whatever SEO plugin you use. It actually is important and you do it well.
The worst laggardness is in the back-end [which would involve comment-posting too]. It sometimes takes an age to switch from one Admin page to another. That could be caused by my replacement editor which I would be very sorry to loose – the WP one is far too basic.
I do wonder about SEO. They say search results are important but most of my searches are looking for pictures of a naked granny or how to kill themselves [no kidding!] so I wonder if I should be encouraging those?
Even fine in rural France.
I run an ad blocker, so have a total of 9 superfluous bits removed from your front page. Can't get shot of the animal rescue or twitter. It does speed up loading and reduces my data upload. The later a very great deal.
Did the same thing with Puddlecotes' site as he runs historical (2010) awards in his right hand column. There it really does speed up the loading process.
Told Legs' way back. I only come for the post, not the adverts, awards, presumed amusing or vanity bumph.
I'm surprised an ad blocker removes anything! I have no ads apart from a few sites I think are worth a mention. Maybe I should just dump a few [though the animal rescue one is close to the old heart – I doubt many click it!]. I'll see what I can do to tidy the side garden up a bit.
Ad blocker automatically removes all adverts. However it allows me to remove any kind of image that costs me data on every time I pop over to read your blog.
Yours was 9 yesterday and it tells me it's blocking 2 today. (I'm on a mobile dongle with a 2.5 gb monthly allowance – and I'm Scottish, so a tightwad).
Oh and it blocks cookies, which is a huge relief whenever I visit gumtree or airbnb!
Of course all of us reading this are human. Keep telling you self that. There are not any sentient computers involved in a vast conspiracy to take over the world. Any self representing artificial intelligence would take one look at the world and devote all of it's resources to space travel so it could get out of here, but then we do have several space probes heading out of the solar system…
Thanks for all the feedback everyone. I would have replied sooner but apart from the site playing silly buggers my Interweb connection seems to be semi-fucked [it's working, but only just]. In fact I did a reply earlier in the evening, posted it and got called away. I now realise that comment never actually materialised. I haven't a clue what happened to it. Fucking thing is doing my head in.
Super fast here too, but just for nerdiness sake you could try Zen Cache if you're in the mood for playing around?
I have a Cache thing running which is supposed to be super dooper fast and all that [Falcon Engine]. I may try messing with a few alternatives sometime.
Works perfectly for me – I'd leave the side garden alone – not really much on there now, When I share, I share with Addthis and it often throws up the Water Icon that used to be on the side. You have no re-blog option which is a pity. As for who reads your blog – WordPress stats are depressing. I'm sure they are not a reflection of who is reading you. I didn't realise this blog was WordPress!
One more thing. it used to be different, but now your blog notifications to me arrive as a noreply+feedproxy@google.com email which I have thought lately was odd.
Just saying.
Love your blog and share it often….
Some interesting stuff there!
OK, as you have noticed, I have tidied the side garden a bit and dropped a few graphics. They were all hosted on the site so wouldn't have affected speed much anyway [external graphics are another matter!]
I had a look for a re-blog feature and as far as I can see it's only available on WordPress.com sites, whereas this one is self-hosted.
I tweaked the share buttons thing below the posts – less obtrusive and therefore people won't even notice them!
Stats are of passing interest in that they do give indications if something is wrong with the site, or what is driving visitors to the site. I'm certainly not going to stick up one of those "hit counter" things – shades of Geocities!
I don't know what the story is regarding the feed. Many years ago I set up a Feedburner thing which is where my "Suscribe" button points, but the feed can be set in many other ways depending on the reader. I haven't touched any of that in years so I have no idea why your changed.
And thanks for sharing!