WP Plugins – Costly Load Times May Cripple Your Blog Site !
It should be quite obvious to most of us that there is indeed a requirement for additional plugins when using Wordpress, not just to plug the security holes, but also to add usability to our blogs.
However does the advantage they offer outweigh the cost in site load time..?
This is an area that few of us even consider when we happily add a newly discovered plugin & then sit back and marvel at the improvements made to our blog !
But behind the scenes what is the real effect & cost to our blog in terms of speed & load times..?
Google’s Caffeine & Future Plans
Most of the more tech savvy users will be aware of Google’s new Caffeine program that was unveiled in August 2009, you may also be aware of the new site speed test available on Google webmaster tools. So where is all this leading you may ask..? Well having done a little research recently on this matter, I have discovered that Google is considering using site load time (speed) as a crucial factor in deciding the ranking of said sites !
Are alarm bells ringing..?
Well my friends I think there should at least be a flashing amber beacon, if not any alarm bells, you see many of us, in fact I would say the vast majority of us, are not wealthy people, we are not big businesses with a bottomless pot of cash to throw at our blog sites & therefore we tend to opt for shared hosting as opposed to dedicated hosting. What’s the difference..? well shared hosting is where you may pay in the region of $10.00 / month for hosting on a server that also has dozens of other users on it, hence the name “shared”. Dedicated hosting however, is where you alone are hosted on your very own private server, for which you can expect to pay around $400 / month. So if the speed of a server is rated as X and Y is the number of sites hosted on that server, then basically your site speed would equate to X / Y = Z.
The problem lies in the fact that Google has now decided to inform me that my site load time is something in the region of 92% slower than everybody else or put another way, in the bottom or slowest 8%. Argh!!! Panic sets in & rightly so, because I am hosted with the top company world wide, albeit shared hosting. This is now why my plugin library suddenly becomes so important, because the more plugins you have loaded into your blog, then the slower your blog will be! This is especially true of Java based plugins such as sliders, which have always been known to be resource hungry!
So how will this affect my site ranking..? Well it does not take a genius to figure out that Google is not going to award smarty points for being in the bottom 8% & therefore if they do indeed decide to start using site load times in determining ranking, this is going to cause a huge shake up throughout the Internet & those that will eventually come out on top will again be the big boys, the select few that can afford to lavish $400 / month on a dedicated server. This is yet another example of a heavily weighted system that is definitely not in our favour!
What are your views on this..? Would this cause you to quit blogging..? Let us know how you feel about this in the comment box below….
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Good points, I haven’t really thought of wordpress plugins slowing down a web page but I see that they can slow the web page down alot. This would not allow me to quit blogging, I will stick with shared hosting until I have a large enough site with enough people to afford a dedicated server.
Hahaha yes Curt you and me both, I could not quit blogging now, after 2 years it has become a major part of my everyday life! Having said that, I have changed hosting company yet again, changed my website theme yet again & also stripped out some unused fuctions from the theme. The result of all this is I have managed to halve my sites load time from 12.5 to 6.5 seconds.
That should keep the Google God a little happier I hope..?